Dr Banu Turnaoğlu Açan
College positions: College Lecturer, Director of Studies in Human, Social and Political Sciences (Politics)
Subject: Human, Social and Political Sciences
Dr Banu Turnaoğlu Açan is a College Lecturer and Director of Studies in Human, Social and Political Sciences at Magdalene.
Dr Banu Turnaoğlu Açan’s research explores the global circulation of ideas on empire, constitutionalism, and republicanism, with particular attention to the late Ottoman Empire, the early Turkish Republic, and comparative constitutional thought. She examines how concepts such as liberty, sovereignty, justice, and order travelled between empires and nation-states, and how moments of crisis and disruption reshaped modern visions of political order.
Her first monograph, The Formation of Turkish Republicanism (Princeton University Press, 2017), redefined the intellectual landscape of Ottoman and Turkish political thought by tracing the long development of republican ideas and their global connections.
Her current projects include The Eastern Question: A New History (Princeton, under contract), Positivism, Anti-Imperialism and Republicanism: The Political Thought of Ahmed Rıza (Cambridge, under contract), and Histories of Global Constitutionalism (Cambridge, co-edited, under contract). She serves on the editorial boards of the Intellectual History Review and Max Weber Studies.
Research Interests
- Global intellectual history and comparative political thought
- Ottoman and Middle Eastern constitutionalism
- Republicanism and the theory of liberty
- Positivism and modernity across global intellectual traditions
- Political languages of order, crisis, and legitimacy
Qualifications
- BA (Hons), International Relations and History, Koç University
- MSc, Political Theory, University of Oxford
- PhD, Politics and International Studies, University of Cambridge
KEY PUBLICATIONS
Books
The Formation of Turkish Republicanism. Princeton University Press, 2017.
Republicanism in Turkey: Visions, Dreams and Cultivation of a Political Reality, Journal of Political Ideologies (2024).
Early Socialism and the Impact of the Paris Commune on the Ottoman Political Imagination in the Nineteenth Century, Global Intellectual History (2023).
Osmanlı’da erken dönem sosyalizm ve radikal cumhuriyetçiliğin düşünsel kökenleri, Tarih ve Toplum, no. 22 (2023): 55–90.
Understanding the ‘New Turkey’ through Max Weber’s Category of Caesarism (with E. Fuat Keyman), Max Weber Studies 22, no. 2 (2022): 60–93.
Despotism (İstibdad) in Ottoman Political Thought, History of Political Thought 41, no. 1 (2020): 16–42.
Positivist Universalism and Republicanism of the Young Turks, Modern Intellectual History 14, no. 3 (2017): 777–805.
A Battle of Ideologies in the Formative Years of the Turkish Republic, Middle Eastern Studies 52, no. 4 (2016): 677–93.
Neo-Roma ve Neo-Atina Cumhuriyetçiliği: Türkiye, Cumhuriyetçilik ve Demokratikleşme (with E. Fuat Keyman), Doğu-Batı 47 (2009): 37–65.
Book chapters
Particularism vs. Universalism: Ottomanism and Constitutionalism during the Second Constitutional Period, in Hans Lukas Kieser and Khatchig Mouradian (eds.), The I.B. Tauris Handbook of the Late Ottoman Empire: History and Legacy (I.B. Tauris, 2025).
The Origins of Turkish Radical Republicanism, in Bruno Leipold, Karma Nabulsi, and Stuart White (eds.), Radical Republicanism: Recovering the Tradition’s Popular Heritage (Oxford University Press, 2020).
The New Ottoman Conception of War, State and Society in the Prelude to the First World War, in Dimitris Stamatopoulos (ed.), European Revolutions and the Ottoman Balkans: Nationalism, Violence and Empire in the Long Nineteenth Century (I.B. Tauris, 2020).
Email
bt265@cam.ac.uk