Yücel Yanikdag

Yücel Yanikdağ, assistant professor of history, has been awarded a grant from the 2009 Fulbright Hays Faculty Research Abroad program. Administered by the U.S. Department of Education, this program will provide funds in support of Yanikdağ’s project, “Civilizing the Nation: Prisoners of War, Medicine, and Nationalism in Turkey, 1914-1939.” Research will be conducted in several libraries located in Istanbul and Ankara, Turkey over a period of more than seven months.

This research explores how Ottoman and Turkish nationalisms were constructed by two related groups: Ottoman prisoners of war in WWI and Ottoman-Turkish military doctors who diagnosed the illnesses of the prisoners after the war. Yanikdağ is examining what the prisoners understood of nation, culture and tradition, and what role medicine and science played in the ideal nation doctors wanted to build after the war. The doctors’ interpretations of prisoners’ health issue led to far-reaching questions about the affinities between the prisoners’ physical bodies and mental states on the one hand, and on the other, the body politic and collective mentality of the republic during the interwar period.