Nicholas Danforth
Nicholas Danforth is the author of “The Remaking of Republican Turkey: Memory and Modernity Since the Fall of the Ottoman Empire”. He is a non-resident fellow at the Hellenic Foundation for European and Foreign Policy. He has previously worked on Turkey and its region for the Wilson Center, German Marshall Fund and Bipartisan Policy Center. Danforth received his M.A. from the School of Oriental and African Studies and his B.A. from Yale. He completed his Ph.D. in history at Georgetown University in 2015 and has written widely about the Middle East and U.S. foreign policy for publications including The Atlantic, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, New York Times and the Washington Post.
Latest from Nicholas Danforth
Revisiting the Adams Colony Affair in Palestine
The story involves a hard-drinking lapsed actor and former Mormon abolitionist who sets off from Maine in 1866 to build a colony in Palestine. He fails spectacularly and his followers, after facing disease, bandits and financial ruin, end up on a ship home with a highly amused Mark Twain.
A Fetih Accompli: How Erdogan Married Religion and Nationalism
Where observers focused on the divide between religion and nationalism, Erdogan grasped how effectively they could be wielded together. And he proceeded to fuse these overlapping traditions through a series of real and imagined battles against such common enemies as Western imperialism, Greeks and left-wing Kurds. The result is a potent ideological current that will continue to bedevil Turkey’s democratic aspirations and relations with the West long after Erdogan exits the scene.
An Enduring Tension: Turkey Caught in the Middle
The violent dissolution of the Ottoman Empire in World War I created a complex and enduring relationship between Turkish attitudes toward the Arab world and Turkish attitudes toward Europe.
Turks in America
The 1940s and ’50s were a golden age for Turkish travel writing. These were boom years for the Turkish publishing industry, and visitors invariably wrote up their experiences in books and newspaper columns with titles like “Letters from America,” satisfying a hungry audience.
Blurred Lines
The Middle East’s post-Ottoman borders are seen as an ugly embodiment of the way colonialism, nationalism and the 20th-century state dismembered the region. But the Middle East’s new political regimes solidified these lines in the sand with fortified borders.