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Article by UDaily staff October 24, 2016
Charles King of Georgetown University will deliver a lecture titled "Europe, Turkey and the Age of the Refugee: What the Past Can Teach Us about the Present" from 4-5:30 p.m., Wednesday, Nov. 2, in 037 Memorial Hall on the University of Delaware’s Newark campus.
The talk, which is free and open to the public, is sponsored by the European Studies and Islamic Studies programs and the Department of History.
King is professor of international affairs and chair of the Department of Government at Georgetown.
His talk will be based on his book Midnight at the Pera Palace: The Birth of Modern Istanbul. He will shed light on the early history of the Turkish Republic and, more broadly, the moment in European history when Westerners were often needy immigrants and Easterners their reluctant hosts.
The interwar years were an era of urban reinvention and imperial collapse, but they were also what King calls the hidden Islamic jazz age — a moment when the center of the Ottoman Empire began to transform itself into a modern metropolis.
Through war, regime change and refugee flight, Istanbul emerged as a new kind of cosmopolitan center, King says.
