Mehmet Dosemeci received his PH.D. in History from Columbia University in 2009.  Before joining ICLS as an Interact Fellow, he spent a year as a Max Weber Fellow at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy.  His overall work engages with the intellectual and cultural history of Turkish-European relations in the twentieth century.  His current book project, Joining Europe: Civilization and Nationalism in Turkish-EEC Relations, examines how Turkey’s half-century long membership bid into the European Union transformed Turkey’s understanding of itself and its place within the world.  Going beyond the diplomatic and political accounts of Turkish-EU relations, it traces the existential grip that the European project held over the Turkish social-imaginary. 

As a visiting assistant professor at Bowdoin College and Columbia University, Mehmet has taught courses on a variety of topics including European intellectual history, global social movements, and the national imagination.  

He is currently co-teaching CPLS W3955: The "West" in Global Thought with fellow INTERACT Postdoctoral Fellow Reto Hofmann.

In Fall 2011, he taught: CPLS V3690: Radical Democracy: From the Jacobins to Tahrir Square This course examines the global history of radical democracy from the French Revolution to the present. Our task is to trace the various attempts to practice democracy that lie outside of the liberal representative model. Spanning the political spectrum, we will investigate everything from democratic armies and factories, anarchist pirate utopias, to claims by many Germans that Nazi Germany "felt more democratic" than its predecessor the Weimar Republic. What sense are we to make of these exceptions to liberal representative democracy? We will ask what these radical ways of organizing and instituting society offer us and question why and how the liberal model has come to hegemonize our conception of democracy today.

Ph.d. History, Columbia University (2009)
B.A. History, UC Berkeley (2001)
B.A. Economics, UC Berkeley (2001)