Melanie S. Tanielian is an Associate Professor of History at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and Director of the Program for International and Comparative Studies. She is a historian of war and society whose work focuses on the emergence of modern humanitarianism. Her first monograph, The Charity of War: Famine, Humanitarian Aid, and World War I in the Middle East, examines how the Ottoman home front confronted total war and mass starvation. Tanielian’s research explores how humanitarian practices take shape in moments of crisis, with particular attention to religious philanthropy, imperial and transnational networks, and the moral languages through which suffering was understood and addressed. Her second monograph, Scandals and Salvation: German Humanitarianism in the Eastern Mediterranean, 1896–1933 (forthcoming, Cambridge University Press), investigates how German Protestant humanitarians navigated moral controversy, religious commitment and geopolitical marginality, revealing scandal as both a crisis and a constitutive method in the development of modern humanitarianism. She has published int the American Historical Review, the Journal for Genocide Research, as well Humanity Journal among others. She is the co-editor of In the Spirit of H. Chandler Davis: Activism and the Struggle for Academic Freedom (Disobedience Press, 2026). Her research has been supported by the American Council of Learned Societies and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Erdağ Göknar is Associate Professor of Turkish and Middle East Studies at Duke University and former director of the Duke Middle East Studies Center. He is a scholar of literary and cultural studies and an award-winning translator whose research focuses on the intersections of literature and politics in Turkey and the Middle East; specifically, on late Ottoman legacies in modern and contemporary Turkish fiction, historiography, and popular culture. His books and translations include Orhan Pamuk, Secularism and Blasphemy: The Politics of the Turkish Novel (Routledge, 2013); a co-edited sourcebook, Mediterranean Passages: Readings from Dido to Derrida (UNC Press, 2008); and English-language translations of Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar’s A Mind at Peace (Archipelago Books, 2011); Orhan Pamuk’s My Name is Red (Knopf, 2010; 2001) and Atiq Rahimi’s Earth and Ashes (Harcourt, 2002; Other 2010). He has also written a collection of poetry, Nomadologies (Turtle Point, 2017), and co-edited Conversations with Orhan Pamuk (University Press of Mississippi, 2024). His articles and commentaries have appeared in South Atlantic Quarterly, the Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies, NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction, Literature and Theology, and the Los Angeles Review of Books. He is the recipient of two NEA Translation Fellowships, and his current research focuses on intersections of law and literature in the analysis of the Allied occupation of Istanbul (1918-23) and political violence through historical legal cases. Hülya Adak is Senior Fellow at the Orient Institut Istanbul der Max Weber Stiftung and Visiting Professor of Gender Studies at the Margherita von Brentano Zentrum at Freie Universität Berlin. Between 2019-2022, she was the Director of SU Gender (Sabancı University's Gender and Women's Studies Center). She served as Professor of Ottoman and Turkish Studies at Freie Universität Berlin (2018-2020) and Assistant & Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and Gender Studies at Sabancı University (2001-2024). She is the recipient of the Alexander von Humboldt Fellowship for Experienced Researchers and Newton Grant (British Academy, with Murat Akser). Her articles in the fields of gender studies, memory and trauma studies, empire studies and nationalism, history of human rights, literature, theater, and film studies have been published in prominent journals, including the PMLA, New Perspectives on Turkey & South Atlantic Quarterly. Her recent works include Aesthetic Interventions to Gender-Based Violence and Sexual Violence (Special Issue of the European Journal of Women's Studies, 2025, with Julia Garraio); Critical Perspectives on Genocide: History, Politics and Aesthetics of 1915 (Routledge, 2023, with Müge Göçek and Ron Suny), Mapping Gender: What’s New and What’s Ahead in Ottoman and Turkish Studies (Max Weber Stiftung 2022, with Richard Wittmann); Performing Turkishness: Politics of Theater in Turkey and its Diasporas, (Special Issue of Comparative Drama, 2018, with R. Ertuğ Altınay), Halide Edib and Political Violence: The Armenian Atrocities, Dictatorship and Nonviolence (Bilgi UP, 2016, in turkish).
