Making the Modern Turkish Citizen

• Department of History

In this lecture, Özge Calafato (University of Amsterdam) will discuss her recent book on how vernacular photographs had an influence on people in the formative years of the Turkish Republic. The event is organized with the gender and feminist studies working group

Özge Calafato's book Making the Modern Turkish Citizen: Vernacular Photography in the Early Republican Era explores the photographic self-representations of the urban middle classes in Turkey in the 1920s and the 1930s. Examining the relationship between photography and gender, body, space as well as materiality and language, the book investigates how the production and circulation of vernacular photographs contributed to the making of the modern Turkish citizen in the formative years of the Turkish Republic. 

Author:

Özge Calafato is Lecturer in Literary and Cultural Analysis at the University of Amsterdam. Her research interests lie at the intersection of photography, archives, memory and cultural identity. She is the author of Making the Modern Turkish Citizen: Vernacular Photography in the Early Republican Era (I.B. Tauris, 2022). Between 2014 and 2020 she worked as the Assistant Director for the Akkasah: Center for Photography at the New York University Abu Dhabi.

Discussant:

Enise Seyda Kapusuz is a Researcher at the EUI History Department. Her dissertation title is Image and the Imaginary of The New Ottoman Muslim Woman: Modernization, Women, and Photography in the Late Ottoman Istanbul (1913-1924). Her research interests are visual studies, media archeology, the history of the Late Ottoman Empire, and feminist media studies.

Please register in order to get a seat or receive the ZOOM link.