James H. Meyer – författare

Nâzım Hikmet (1902-1963) is best known as a poet and communist whose daring flight by motorboat from Turkey to the Eastern Bloc captured international headlines in 1951. One of the most important poets to have written in the Turkish language, Nâzım Hikmet's dramatic life story is fascinating in its own right, but also intersects with the story of the broader twentieth century. James H. Meyer situates Nâzım Hikmet within the broader context of Turkish communist "border-crossers," individuals whose lives would go on to be shaped significantly by their ability, inability, or need to traverse the frontier. Born at the turn of the twentieth century and coming of age in the early 1920s, the women and men from Nâzım Hikmet's generation were the last of the Ottomans. Children of empire, they had grown up in an era of porous frontiers, but by the time they reached their third decade, these borders had begun to close. Drawing upon an enormous amount of previously untapped archival materials and personal papers from Moscow, Istanbul, Amsterdam, and Washington, DC, Meyer has written a biography of Nâzım Hikmet unlike any other. A book of world history wrapped inside a life story, Red Star over the Black Sea shows how changing attitudes toward borders and the people who cross them impacted a late imperial generation all the way up to the final years of the Cold War.

Turks Across Empires tells the story of the pan-Turkists, Muslim activists from Russia who gained international notoriety during the Young Turk era of Ottoman history. Yusuf Akçura, Ismail Gasprinskii and Ahmet Agaoglu are today remembered as the forefathers of Turkish nationalism, but in the decade preceding the First World War they were known among bureaucrats, journalists and government officials in Russia and Europe as dangerous Muslim radicals. This volume traces the lives and undertakings of the pan-Turkists in the Russian and Ottoman empires, examining the ways in which these individuals formed a part of some of the most important developments to take place in the late imperial era.James H. Meyer draws upon a vast array of sources, including personal letters, Russian and Ottoman state archival documents, and published materials to recapture the trans-imperial worlds of the pan-Turkists. Through his exploration of the lives of Akçura, Gasprinskii and Agaoglu, Meyer analyzes the bigger changes taking place in the imperial capitals of Istanbul and St. Petersburg, as well as on the ground in central Russia, Crimea and the Caucasus.Turks Across Empires focuses especially upon three developments occurring in the final decades of empire: an explosion in human mobility across borders, the outbreak of a wave of revolutions in Russia and the Middle East, and the emergence of deeply politicized forms of religious and national identity. As these are also important characteristics of the post-Cold War era, argues Meyer, the events surrounding the pan-Turkists provide valuable lessons regarding the nature of present-day international and cross-cultural geopolitics.