Writers for Democratic Action and Democracy Book Club presents…

Hülya Adak, Çevat Dargın, Fatma Müge Göçek, & Ragıp Zarakolu

Hülya Adak is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature & Gender Studies at Sabancı University and director of the Gender Studies Center there and visiting professor at the Free University of Berlin. Her books include: Mapping Gender: What’s New and What’s Ahead in Ottoman and Turkish Studies (2022, with Richard Wittmann); Critical Perspectives on Genocide: History, Politics and Aesthetics of 1915 (2023, with Müge Göçek and Ron Suny).


Çevat Dargın, born in Tunceli in the Dersim region of Turkey and educated in Istanbul. He holds a PhD from Princeton University and is a Manoogian Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Michigan where he is affiliated with the Department of History and the Center for Armenian Studies. He is working on a book tentatively titled Preparing for a Genocide “Inside Four Mountains”: Racialization, Violence, and Environment in the Kurdish Province of Dersim.


Fatma Müge Göçek was born raised and educated in Istanbul, received her Ph.D. at Princeton University and is Professor of Sociology at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Her work focuses on comparative politics and gender, and on nationalism, religious movements and mass violence and minorities. Her books include Denial of Violence: Ottoman Past, Turkish Present and the Collective Violence against the Armenians, 1789-2009 (Oxford University Press, 2015), The Transformation of Turkey: Redefining State and Society from the Ottoman Empire to the Modern Era (I.B. Tauris Publishers, 2011), Rise of the Bourgeoisie, Demise of Empire: Ottoman Westernization and Social Change (Oxford University Press, 1996), East Encounters West: France and the Ottoman Empire in the 18th Century (Oxford University Press, 1987).


Ragıp Zarakolu was born in Principo Islands off Istanbul. Journalist, Publisher, Human Rights defender, he is co-founder of the newspaper, Demokrat (1979), the Human Rights Association (1986) the History Foundation (1991), and co-Founder of the groundbreaking Belge Publishing Company in 1977. He was put in trial with late wife Ayşe Nur Zarakolu more than 50 times for publishing books considered subversive. He was imprisoned after the 1971 and 1980 military coups, and also in 2011 when he was put in solitary confinement. He has received awards from the International Association of Genocide Scholars, the Norwegian Writers Association, Danish PL Freedom, World Publishers Association, American Publishers Association American and Dutch PEN. He currently writes for dissident newspapers in Turkey and Europe, and lives in exile in Sweden with his wife and recently has been arrested in absentia.

Peter Balakian is the author of Ozone Journal winner of the Pulitzer Prize for poetry, the memoir Black Dog of Fate, winner of the PEN/Albrand Award, and The Burning Tigris: The Armenian Genocide and American’s Response, winner of the Raphael Lemkin Prize. He is Rebar Professor of the Humanities in the department of English at Colgate University.

WDA presents The Democracy Book Club: An Afternoon with Hülya Adak, Çevat Dargın, Fatma Müge Göçek, Ragıp Zarakolu, & Peter Balakian