Winners of the 5th Prize Competition for
Research on the History of Banking and Finance announced
Thewinners of the 5th Prize Competition for Research on the History of Banking and Finance organized by the Ottoman Bank Archives and Research Center in collaboration with the European Association for Banking History (EABH) and the History Foundation of Turkey (Tarih Vakfı) received their awards on Tuesday, December 15, at a ceremony held at Garanti Bank’s head office. The competition, sponsored by Garanti Bank, aims to promote academic research on Turkish banking, finance, and economic history, from Ottoman times to the present, and to establish a tradition in that field.
Joseph Glass-Ruth Kark won the best monograph prize with their study entitled “Sephardi Entrepreneurs in Jerusalem: The Valero Family 1800-1948,” while Nursel Manav’s dissertation, “Devlet-Banker İlişkileri Çerçevesinde Baltazzi Ailesi,” [The Baltazzi Family from a State-Banker Relations Perspective] received the best master’s thesis award. Hilary Cooperman-Relli Shechter earned the best scientific paper award for their work “Branding the Riders: ‘Marlboro Country’ and the Formation of a New Middle Class in Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Turkey.” Honorary mentions were given to Devrim Dumludağ in the doctoral thesis category for his thesis entitled “Foreign Direct Investment in Developing Economies and Turkey: The Role of Institutions,” and to Kazım Baycar in the master’s thesis category for his essay “Ottoman Emigration to Argentina 1870-1914.” There were no research grant winners this year.
The winning works from last year’s competition, Burcu Kurt’s study, “Osmanlı Irak’ında İngiliz Nüfuzuna Tepkiler: Dicle ve Fırat’ta Seyr-i Sefain İmtiyazı Teşebbüsü (1909-1913),” winner of the best scientific paper award and Nurşen Gürboğa’s “Mine Workers, the Single Party Rule, and War: the Zonguldak Coal Basin as the Site of Contest, 1920-1947,” winner of the best doctoral thesis award, have been published and are currently available for purchase.
A two-day Oral History Workshop organized by the Ottoman Bank Archive and Research Center in collaboration with Sabancı University and led by Assoc. Prof. Leyla Neyzi was held at the Ottoman Bank Museum. Attending were some 200 people including faculty members, history professors, master's and doctoral students, artists, architects, NGO representatives and museum employees. 30 of the attendants came from provinces outside Istanbul such as Ankara, Eskişehir, Mersin, Kocaeli, Kars, Muğla, Balıkesir, Kırklareli, Antalya, Aydın, Izmir and Kayseri. 70% of those attending the workshops were female, and 30% consisted of students.
The aim of the two-day workshop was to provide a common ground for history/oral history studies and memory studies as well as to promote knowledge about oral history metodology and popularize its use in Turkey. The workshop now continues with weekly group sessions organized in collaboration with Sabancı University, which will be also held at the Museum. The goal of these group sessions will be to foster scholarly oral history projects, create an oral history archive and share this material with the general public through websites and publications.
Workshop Activities
The major aim of the two-day workshop held on Saturday, January 31, 2009 and Sunday, February 1, 2009, was to investigate the contribution of oral history to the research and understanding of recent Turkish history. On the first day of the workshop, seminars led by Assoc. Prof. Leyla Neyzi addressed the emergence of oral history and its institutionalization, while on the second day, the topics addressed were oral history methodology and ethics. In the afternoons, there were question answer sessions and discussions of the participants' papers. A wide range of attendants from different backgrounds submitted a great variety of oral history studies, which nevertheless converged on certain topics such as memory, trauma, ethics, the place of oral history in social sciences, building oral history archives and recording and analyzing interviews.
Stressing the fact that oral history interviews have to go through a professional preparation and analysis process, Leyla Neyzi explained that in Turkey, where oral history is both a relatively new field of research and one somewhat disregarded by the well established discipline history, oral history and memory studies must become institutionalized in order to achieve recognition as an interdisciplinary research area. The workshop focused on examples of oral history studies undertaken in Turkey and discussed how such studies carriedout in other countries with a similar historical past had transformed both society and the understanding of history.
