Born in Karlıova, Bingöl in 1955, Nebahat Akkoç graduated from the Teachers School for Girls, and for 22 years taught in the towns and villages of the Diyarbakır Province. In 1993, her husband, also a teacher, was shot and killed on his way to school. After her husband’s death, Akkoç retired from teaching, and turned her full attention to human rights. Becoming a board member of the Human Rights Association. She was arrested and tortured for 12 days in 1994. It was at this time that Nebahat Akkoç turned the focus of her human rights work to women’s issues. In 1997, Akkoç established KA-MER (The Women’s Center), a not-for-profit organization dedicated to the struggle against gender-based violence (including the killing of women in the name of “honor”) and to facilitating women’s empowerment through such programs as “An Opportunity for Every Woman,” which currently operates in more than 20 cities in eastern and southeastern Anatolia.

Born in 1954, Sezen Aksu left the University of İzmir Department of Agricultural Engineering to pursue her dream of becoming a professional singer. Her artistic vocation was sparked in 1975 by a move to İstanbul, the heart of the music industry in Turkey. A singer, composer, and songwriter with more than 20 albums, Aksu is one of Turkey’s most popular musicians today. During her career, she has collaborated with the most talented and prominent musicians in Turkish music, and gained international recognition in 1991 and 1993 when two of her singles, Hadi Bakalım and Sude rose to the Billboard charts. Performed by Tarkan, Aksu’s compositions Şımarık and Şıkıdım also topped the charts in Europe. Her music is influenced by Anatolian songs and Turkish classical music, intertwined with Aegean motifs. This approach, imbued by Aksu’s honest and humorous lyrics of love, hope, longing, and regret, creates a synergy that makes her music appealing to people of all ages and social backgrounds. Sezen Aksu’s 2002 concert, The Songs of Turkey, featured a wealth of songs from Turkey’s diverse musical traditions.

İshak Alaton, Chairman of the Alarko Holding, was born in İstanbul in 1927. He attended Şişli Terakki High School and Lycée Saint-Michel, but was forced to leave school after the eighth grade out of financial necessity. His father, Hayim Alaton, had been sent to the Aşkale labor camp because of a wealth tax that had been imposed on non-Muslims. The young Alaton needed to support his family, and found a job as an office boy at the Kavala Company. Later, he moved to Sweden and worked as a welder at the Motola train engine factory, while attending night school to learn technical drawing. For two years, he worked at Motola as a technical draftsman, and then returned to Turkey when he was 26 to found the Alarko Company with Üzeyir Garih. This partnership, which began in a one-room office, grew into Alarko Holding, a company that celebrated its 52nd anniversary in 2006. Alaton, who received “The First Class North Star” from the King of Sweden in 1993, is also the Honorary Consul in İstanbul for the Republic of South Africa, and the Vice Chairperson of Turkish Economic and Social Studies Foundation (TESEV).

Ayşe Gül Altınay’s passion for reading and writing was inspired by her teacher, Hacer Fırat, at Şair Sırrı Hanım Primary School in Diyarbakır. She continued her education at Karakaya Dam Primary School in Çüngüş and the F.M.V. Işık High School in İstanbul. At Boğaziçi University, Altınay majored in political science and sociology, and received her PhD in cultural anthropology from Duke University. She currently teaches anthropology, cultural studies, and gender studies at Sabancı University in İstanbul. As the daughter of a mother from Mostar (former Yugoslavia) and a father from Halfeti (Urfa) and Kilis, and having grown up in Diyarbakır and İstanbul, the question “Where are you from?” has always been a difficult one for her. Altınay is the author of The Myth of the Military-Nation: Militarism, Gender, and Education in Turkey and Vatan-Millet-Kadınlar. Her current research focuses on feminists who organize against gender-based violence in Turkey.

John Berger was born in London in 1926. After attending the St. Edward’s School in Oxford and serving in the British Army, he enrolled in the Chelsea School of Art and the Central School of Art in London. While teaching drawing from 1948 to 1955, he became an art critic, publishing many essays and reviews. He is well known for his novels and stories as well as for his works of nonfiction, including several volumes on art criticism, which include The Sense of Sight, Ways of Seeing and About Looking. In 1972, the BBC broadcast his television series Ways of Seeing and published its companion text, an introduction to the study of images, which helped revolutionize the way fine art is read and understood. The same year, he received the Booker Prize with his novel, G. John Berger left Britain permanently in 1962, and now lives in a small village in the French Alps.

Murat Belge was born in Ankara in 1943. He graduated from the İstanbul University Department of English Language and Literature in 1966. After being imprisoned for two years during the March 1971 military coup, he returned to the University in 1974. In 1981, during the military regime that began after the 1980 military coup, he resigned from his university position. He has written for a number of periodicals, such as Halkın Dostları, Birikim, Yeni Dergi, Yeni Gündem, Milliyet Sanat, and Papirüs, as well as the dailies Cumhuriyet, Demokrat, Milliyet, and Radikal. He founded İletişim Publications in 1983. Belge, who became a professor in 1997, teaches at Bilgi University and writes for Radikal newspaper. He is the author of numerous books, including Tarihten Güncelliğe, Sosyalizm, Türkiye ve Gelecek, Marksist Estetik, The Blue Cruise, Türkiye Dünyanın Neresinde, 12 Yıl Sonra 12 Eylül, İstanbul Gezi Rehberi, Boğaziçi'nde Yalılar ve İnsanlar, and has translated works by William Faulkner, James Joyce, and John Berger into Turkish.

Born in 1962, Ruşen Çakır graduated from Lycée de Galatasaray, and from there went on to work as a journalist and writer at Nokta, a weekly news magazine, and at Cumhuriyet, a daily newspaper. He was the news editor of Tempo from 1988 to 1991, and a senior correspondent for the Milliyet daily from 1993 to 1999. Moving on to television news, Çakır was a senior correspondent for CNN TÜRK, and a news program editor for NTV, where he covered international news from Iran, Israel, Palestine, and Iraq. The author of several books, Çakır has also taught political science courses, such as Islam, Democracy and Human Rights at the State University of New York (SUNY) at Buffalo, as well as Islamic Political Thought at Marmara University. He is currently the Washington, D.C. correspondent of Vatan, a Turkish daily newspaper and the editor of Siyahbeyaz (Blackwhite) series at Metis Publishing. Çakır also contributes to the Turkish Economic and Social Studies Foundation (TESEV) as both the director of Democracy, Civil Society and Muslim World Program, and the coordinator for the Working Group on Political Violence.

Fethiye Çetin was born in Maden, Elazığ. She completed her primary and secondary education in Mahmudiye, Maden and Elazığ, and graduated from Ankara University Law School. She has been active in the İstanbul Bar Association’s Executive Committee on Human Rights and the Committee on Minority Rights. Çetin is the author of the groundbreaking memoir Anneannem (My Grandmother), which has already been translated into French, German, and Armenian.

Musa Dağdeviren was born in Nizip (a district of Gaziantep) in 1963. He began working alongside his uncles as an apprentice baker at the age of five. From there he went on to become a simit (sesame ring) dealer, a restaurant operator, sweets seller, soup cook, kebab cook, café apprentice, poplar tree laborer, cotton and fruit picker, and welder. After moving to İstanbul in 1979, he worked at his uncle’s restaurant where he was in charge of baking. He was the chef de partie of kebab and baking at the Ender Kebap Salonu in Kadıköy (İstanbul), and first cook for baking, kebabs, and hors d’oeuvres at Kâzım Buhara Et Lokantası in Bostancı (İstanbul). Dağdeviren opened Çiya Kebap-Lahmacun in Kadıköy in 1987, and established Çiya Publications in 2005. He has served as Turkey’s representative at a number of conferences on international cuisine, including two at the Culinary Institute of America, the “Mediterranean Cuisines Conference” in 2003; the “Ancient Fires, World Flavors Conference” in 2005; and the “Conference on the Role of Mediterranean Cuisine For Healthy Eating,” sponsored by Harvard University. Musa Dağdeviren is an active member of the editorial board of YemekveKültür (FoodandCulture) magazine and continues to research forgotten folk dishes.

An alumnus of the Ankara University Political Science Department, Şeyhmus Diken has chosen to work in the private sector, serving as an administrator, director, and advisory board member for various organizations. He has always been interested in studies related to urban culture, urban identity, local and oral history, and is a volunteer tour guide in these areas. Among his published books are Kürdilihicazkâr Metinler, Sırrını Surlarına Fısıldayan Şehir, Diyarbekir Diyarım Yitirmişem Yanarım, Tango ve Diyarbakır, İsyan Sürgünleri, Güneydoğu’da Sivil Hayat, and Türkiye’de Sivil Hayat. Şeyhmus Diken is a member of the Turkish Writers’ Union, and is the Diyarbakır and Southeast representative of International Pen for Turkey. Currently, he works as a consultant for the Mayor’s Office in Diyarbakır.

Alan Duben was born in New York City in 1943. He holds a PhD in social anthropology from the University of Chicago, and is a member of the Department of Sociology and Director of the Center for International Programs at İstanbul Bilgi University. He has held various teaching and research positions at New York University, Bosphorus University, City University of New York, and Hamilton College. He was Dean of the Faculty of Science and Letters at Bilgi University from 2001 to 2004, and is the recipient of research grants from the Ford Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Population Council, the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, and the American Philosophical Society. Duben’s scholarly works include the book, İstanbul Households: Marriage, Family and Fertility, 1880-1940 (with Cem Behar), published in Turkish as İstanbul Haneleri; and Kent, Aile, Tarih (City, Family, History); and many articles published in academic journals.

Born in 1967 in Kırklareli, Aydın Elbasan completed his elementary through high school education in Kırklareli, before graduating from Trakya University’s Kırklareli College of Vocational Education and Marmara University Sports Education College. He taught folk dancing at Trakya University from 1998 to 2001, and is pursuing a master’s degree at the Marmara University Teachers College, while continuing to teach folk dancing at Marmara, as well as other schools in İstanbul.

Ayşe Erzan received her degree in physics from Bryn Mawr College, and her PhD in physics from the State University of New York (SUNY) at Stony Brook. After teaching at the Middle East Technical University in Ankara and İstanbul Technical University, she was a visiting professor at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm. Erzan continued her education and research in the University of Geneva’s Department of Theoretical Physics, and University of Porto Physics Department, as well as the University of Marburg and the University of Groningen. Since 1990, she has been teaching and conducting research in the Physics Department of İstanbul Technical University. Erzan received the Science Award of The Scientific & Technological Research Council of Turkey (TÜBİTAK) in 1997, and is the recipient of the 2003 L’Oréal-UNESCO Award for Europe, an international award that recognizes only five women scientists from five continents.

Ara Güler was born in İstanbul in 1928. He worked as a journalist at Yeni İstanbul newspaper in 1950, and has published many short stories in Armenian for newspapers and literary magazines. In 1961, serving as Director of the Photography Department of Hayat magazine, Güler was cited by the British publication, Photography Annual, as one of the top seven photographers of the world. During the same year, he became the only photographer from Turkey to be accepted as a member of the American Society of Media Photographers (ASMP). Güler has exhibited widely in the United States, Germany, and France. In 1979, the Turkish Press Association awarded him the First Prize in Photojournalism. Ara Güler’in Sinemacıları; Turkish Style; Eski İstanbul Anıları; Bir Devir Böyle Geçti, Kalanlara Selam Olsun; Yitirilmiş Renkler and Yüzlerinde Yeryüzü are among his many works. He received the Presidential Arts and Culture Award in 2005.

Kardeş Türküler began in 1993 as a concert project by the Boğaziçi University Folklore Club. The concert, which aimed to interpret Anatolian folk songs based on their own cultural structure and in their original languages, was comprised of four sections: Turkish, Kurdish, Azerbaijani, and Armenian songs. This innovative musical project was nurtured and guided by the ideal of living together in fraternity, as well as taking a stand against the polarization and tensions that have been created among different peoples in a multicultural land. Later, Kardeş Türküler began broadening its repertoire, performing songs from other cultures: Laz, Georgian, Circassian, Roma, Macedonian, and Alevi, among others. The project came to earn a distinguished status within the musical division of Boğaziçi Performing Arts Ensemble (BGST), formed in 1995, and went on to be performed at many arts and cultural events, and celebrations. The group’s second album, Doğu (The East), came in fourth on the playlist of the English station “Radio Not-Wonderful.” Kardeş Türküler also wrote the score for the film Vizontele, directed by Yılmaz Erdoğan and Ömer F. Sorak, which received the Best Film Score Award at the 38th Antalya Golden Orange Film Festival.

Born in Ankara in 1959, Akif Kurtuluş completed his elementary education in Ankara, and attended high school in Antalya and Seydişehir. He received his law degree from the Ankara University Law School, and continues to practice law in Ankara. In 1981, he began to publish poems and essays. His most prominent poetry collections include Yalan Şiirler, Tören Provası, Kırgınlıklar Galası and Herkes Gitmiş. Kurtuluş is also the author of several nonfiction works, most notably, Romantik Korno, Politika ve Sanat: Ekim Devrimi 1917-1935, and Harita Metod Defteri. In 2005, Kurtuluş shared the prestigious Behçet Necatigil Poetry Award with Betül Tarıman for his book Herkes Gitmiş.

Herkül Millas was born in Ankara in 1940, and lived in İstanbul until 1971. He received his BS in civil engineering from Robert College, and moved to Athens after the military coup of 1971. His translations have been published in over 20 books. From 1990 to 1995, Millas contributed to the establishment of Ankara University’s Greek Literature Department, and received a PhD in political science from the Ankara University Faculty of Political Science. He has published several books and articles on inter-ethnic perceptions, and has received many awards, including the Abdi İpekçi Special Peace Award (1992); the Association of Translators Award (Athens, 1996); the Abdi İpekçi Peace Award as a member of the Greek-Turkish Forum (2001); the Dido Sotiriou Award of Hellenic Authors’ Society (2004); and the Free Thinking and Expression Award of The Publishers’ Association of Turkey (2005). Millas has taught Turkish language and literature at the University of Macedonia (Thessaloniki), and the Aegean University (Rhodes). He is currently a professor of Turkish Literature and Turkish Political Thought at the University of Athens, Greece.

An anthropologist and oral historian at the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at Sabancı University, Leyla Neyzi’s areas of expertise include cultural identity, nationalism and minorities, oral history, memory studies, and Middle Eastern and Southeast European ethnography and social history. Her recent articles include “Amele Taburu: The Journal of a Jewish Soldier in the Labor Battalions during the Turkish War of Independence”; “Strong as Steel, Fragile as a Rose: A Turkish Jewish Witness to the Twentieth Century”; “Fragmented in Space: The Oral History Narrative of an Arab Christian from Antioch, Turkey”; “Trauma, Narrative and Silence: The Military Journal of a Jewish ‘Soldier’ in Turkey during the Greco-Turkish War”; and “Remembering to Forget: Sabbateanism, National Identity and Subjectivity in Turkey.” Neyzi is also the author of “Ben Kimim?” Türkiye’de Sözlü Tarih, Kimlik ve Öznellik (“Who am I?” Oral History, Identity and Subjectivity in Turkey) and Birey, Bellek, Aidiyet: Sözlü Tarih Çalışmaları (Self, Memory and Belonging: Studies in Oral History).

Ayşe Öncü teaches sociology and cultural studies at Sabancı University. She received her BA from the Middle East Technical University Department of Social Sciences, an MA from Bryn Mawr College Department of Sociology, and her PhD from Yale University Department of Sociology. For many years, Öncü was a faculty member and Department Chair at Bosphorus University Department of Sociology. She has published extensively on consumer culture, the media, cultural politics, the public sphere, and transnational cultural flows, and is the author of Space, Culture, Power: New Identities In Globalizing Cities (with Petra Weyland); Developmentalism and Beyond: Society and Politics in Egypt & Turkey (with Saad-Eddin Ibrahim and Çağlar Keyder); Turkey and the West: Changing Political and Cultural Identities (with Metin Heper and Heinz Kremer). Öncü has served on the Ford Foundation Middle East Research Awards Grant Committee, Population Council Middle East Research Awards Program Grant Committee, International Sociological Association (ISA) Program Committee, and the Second Worldwide Competition for Young Sociologists Grand Jury. Öncü received the Bosphorus University Distinguished Research Award in 1998.

Born in Strasbourg in 1971, Elif Şafak lived in Spain as a teenager before returning to Turkey. At 27, her first novel, Pinhan - The Sufi, was awarded the Rumi Prize, a distinction reserved for the best works of mystical/transcendental literature. The Mirrors of the City (Şehrin Aynaları), Şafak’s second novel, was followed by Mahrem (Hide-and-Seek), which garnered the Turkish Writers Association Novel Award. A fourth novel, Bit Palas (The Flea Palace) was on the national best-seller list for over nine weeks, and was published in English by Marion Boyars in the United Kingdom. Şafak wrote The Saint of Incipient Insanities (Araf) in English while working in the United States, which was published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux in 2004. The Turkish translation of her latest novel The Bastard of İstanbul (Baba ve Piç) has been a best-seller in Turkey, initiating heated debate on questions of memory and reconciliation. Şafak received an MA in gender and women’s studies, and a PhD in political science from the Middle East Technical University. She has taught at the University of Michigan as a visiting scholar, and is currently a professor in the Department of Near Eastern Studies at the University of Arizona. Maintaining an international presence, Şafak continues to address political issues in newspapers, magazines, and broadcast media in Turkey and the United States, as well as other countries.

Ahmet Tosun Terzioğlu earned a high school diploma from Robert College, an MA in mathematics from Newcastle upon Tyne University, and a PhD in mathematics from the University of Frankfurt. He has taught at the University of Michigan, University of Wuppertal and the Middle East Technical University (METU) between 1968 and 1994, and served as Dean of the Mathematics Department at METU from 1974 to 1975 and from 1989 to 1991; as well as the Dean of the Faculty of Sciences and Arts at METU from 1977 to 1982. He was a member of the Commission on Universities at METU from 1979 to 1981; and a METU Senate member from 1990 to 1991. Terzioğlu presided as President of The Scientific & Technological Research Council of Turkey (TÜBİTAK) from 1992 to 1997, and has published over 50 articles and two books in the field of mathematics. Since 1997, he has served as the President of Sabancı University.

Born in 1976 in İstanbul, Zeynep Türkyılmaz earned a BA in political science and international relations, as well as an MA from Bosphorus University. Currently, Türkyılmaz is a PhD candidate in the History Department at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Takuhi Tovmasyan Zaman’s family was originally from Çorlu. She was born in the Yedikule neighborhood of İstanbul in 1952, and graduated from the Samatya Anarad Higutyun elementary school and the Bakırköy Dadyan School. She attended the Samatya Sahakyan-Nunyan High School. Tovmasyan defines herself as a mother of two sons. She says that her younger years were spent going from the kitchen to the bathroom, and from home to the music conservatory where her sons studied. Ten years ago, Takuhi Tovmasyan wished to change her “mothering path,” but found that there were no jobs available for a 43-year-old homemaker with no professional credentials or experience. Rolling up her sleeves and working as a typesetter for Aras Press’ publications in Armenian, Takuhi Tovmasyan went on to write the well-received cookbook-memoir, Sofranız Şen Olsun (May Your Table be Jolly).