Murat Metinsoy

Murat Metinsoy is Professor of History and Political Science in the Faculty of Economics, at Istanbul University. He received MA and PhD degrees from Boğaziçi University, and BA from Istanbul University. He worked as TA and Lecturer at Boğaziçi University (2001-2010) and taught Humanities and Turkish history and politics at Yıldız Technical University and Yeditepe University. In 2007 he received a doctoral fellowship from Ohio State University and carried out one year research there.

His MA thesis, "Wars outside the War: The Social Impact of the Second World War on Turkey," (2004) was published in Turkish (İkinci Dünya Savaşı'nda Türkiye: Savaş ve Gündelik Yaşam) (2007). This book was awarded "the Best Young Social Scientist Award" by the Turkish Social Science Association and "the Best Book Award" by the Garanti Bankası & Ottoman Bank Archives and Research Center. Its second and third editions were published by İş Bankası Kültür Yayınları betweem 2016-2020. He received his PhD degree in 2010 with a dissertation titled "Everyday Politics of Ordinary People: Public Opinion, Dissent, and Resistance in Early Republican Turkey, 1925-1938." In his dissertation, based on new sources such as police and gendarme reports, court records, reports of provincial governors and RPP politicians, local newspapers, petitions and memoirs, he explored the daily interactions between the state and ordinary people in provinces and how poor peasants and workers negotiated and reshaped the early Republican state's authoritarian policies in everyday life. His last book, The Power of the People: Everyday Resistance and Dissent in the Making of the Modern Turkey, 1923-38, will come out in October 2021 from Cambridge University Press. He published articles on early years of the Republican Turkey in respected national and international journals like International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, New Perspectives on Turkey, Turkish Studies, International Journal of Turcologia, Toplum ve Bilim, Tarih ve Toplum:Yeni Yaklaşımlar, Toplumsal Tarih. His papers were also published in two important anthologies edited by Stephanie Cronin, based on his conferences at Oxford University. (See Crime, Poverty and Survival in the Middle East and the North Africa: Dangerous Classes since 1800, Bloomsbury, 2020 & Anti-Veiling Campaigns in the Muslim World: Gender, Modernism and Politics of Dress, 2014, Routledge). Dr. Metinsoy studies Turkish and Middle Eastern politics, particularly social movements and popular politics, everyday- informal politics under authoritarian regimes, theory and history of developmental issues in rural countries. He gives lectures on world history, history of civilizations, history of Middle East, social history of modern Turkey, theory of history, and history of Turkish novel. Above all, he is a human being, and therefore, playing game with her small daughter, playing piano, listening to "good" music, learning new cultures, watching "good" football matches, cooking world cuisine, reading literature, watching movies from world cinema, contributing to two associations working for children's and women's welfare are among his indispensables...