| Halil Berktay | |
| Birth Date: | 27 August 1947 |
| Nationality: | Turkish |
| Field: | Turkish history |
| Work Institutions: | Ibn Haldun University, Sabancı University, Ankara University, Middle East Technical University, Harvard University |
| Alma Mater: | Yale University, Birmingham University |
Halil Berktay is a Turkish historian at Ibn Haldun University and was columnist for the daily Taraf.[1]
Berktay was born into an intellectual Turkish communist family. His father, Erdoğan Berktay, was a member of the old clandestine Communist Party of Turkey. As a result of this influence, Halil Berktay remained a Maoist for two decades before he became "an independent left-intellectual".[2]
After graduating from Robert College in 1964, Berktay studied economics at Yale University receiving his Bachelor of Arts in 1968 and Master of Arts in 1969.[3] He went on to earn a PhD from Birmingham University in 1990.[3] He worked as lecturer at Ankara University from 1969 to 1971 and from 1978 to 1983.[3] He took part in the founding of the Yale chapter of the Students for a Democratic Society.[2]
Between 1992 and 1997, he taught at both the Middle East Technical University and Boğaziçi University. He was a visiting scholar at Harvard University in 1997, and taught at Sabancı University before returning to Harvard in 2006. He is currently a professor at Ibn Haldun University where he is also the head of the History Department.[4]
Berktay's research areas are the history and historiography of Turkish nationalism in the 20th century. He studies social and economic history (including that of Europe, especially medieval history) from a comparative perspective. He has also written on the construction of Turkish national memory.[3]
After Taner Akçam, Berktay was one of the first Turkish historians to acknowledge the Armenian genocide.[5] In September 2005, Berktay and fellow historians, including Murat Belge, Edhem Eldem, Selim Deringil, convened at an academic conference to discuss the fall of the Ottoman Empire.[6] [7]