Mehmed Fuad Köprülü and the rise of modern historiography in Turkey

Abstract

This dissertation focuses on the intellectual and historical work of a historian who played a crucial role in the emergence and institutionalization of history as an academic discipline in Turkey: Mehmed Fuad Köprülü (1890-1966). Situating his scholarly work and activity within its historico-political context, this study thus aims to present an extensive and historicizing analysis of Köprülü’s historiography and his substantial contribution to the professionalization of Ottoman-Turkish historical writing. It, moreover, treats Köprülü as one of the most important agents of the Turkish nation-building process in the late Ottoman and early republican era, and reveals how his programmatic historiographical production contributed greatly to the nationalist project by providing it with a scholarly valid historical master narrative regarding Turkish history and national past.