Undergraduate Fellow
Jude is entering his final year as a humanities student with ambitions of graduate research in Ottoman and Turkish history. He has previously published in two student journals at the University of Toronto, Plebeian and The Future of History, and one international publication, Afkar, where he now serves as an editor. His research interests include the history of nation building in Turkey, and interactions between Kurdish minorities and modern Turkey and Iran, a topic on which he recently delivered a presentation at a graduate conference. He is literate in Turkish and currently studying Kurmancî Kurdish.
Fellowship Project: Du Dewlet, lê Yek Welat: The Multiethnic Underworld of the Turkist Right
(Pan-)Turkism, an ethnonationalist tendency embraced by elements of the far-right in Turkey and Azerbaijan, is associated with militant xenophobia, denial of linguistic minorities, and support for irredentism of Turkic-speaking peoples. Seemingly paradoxically, many major proponents of this current have historically been of Kurdish descent. My research seeks to chronicle Turkic nationalism among Kurds, tracing its history from the Young Turk era to post-Soviet times, and from there explore the identarian idiosyncrasies of Turkist Kurds. Doing so means exploring the multiethnic underworld of Turkic nationalism in Anatolia and the Caucuses, thus interfacing with broader themes of indigeneity, migration, political exclusion, and the new forms of agency it facilitates.