Dr. Yucel Yanikdag

Assistant Professor of History
107 Ryland Hall
Office: (804) 289-8336
Fax: (804) 287-1992

I am currently working on "Civilizing the Nation: Prisoners of War, and Medicine in Turkey, 1914-1939," a study of how the nation was constructed. I examine two closely related groups: Ottoman prisoners of war in Russia and Egypt and the Ottoman/Turkish military doctors who cared for them during and after the war. By using captivity narratives, camp newspapers, and post-war military medical reports among others this work explores both how the officer prisoners and military doctors imagined their nation as a collective community, and how they at the same time attempted to exclude, if only temporarily, certain groups they deemed as unworthy from the nation.

Teaching:
Middle East, Ottoman, Turkey, nationalism, colonialism, women and gender

Research:
Ottoman and Turkish nationalism, World War I, medicine

Education:
The Ohio State University, Ph.D.

Selected Publications:

"Ottoman Psychiatry and the Great War," in Beiruter Texte und Studien: The First World War as Remembered in the Countries of the Eastern Mediterranean, ed., Olaf Farschid, Manfred Kropp, Stephan Dahne (Beirut, 2006): 163-78. 

"Misir'daki  Osmanli Esirlerinde Görülen Pallegra Hastaligi: I. Dünya Savasinda Tibbi Oryantalizm ve Ingiliz Doktorlar," [Medical Orientalism: Pellagra among Ottoman Prisoners in Egypt and the British doctors] in Toplumsal Tarih #153 (September 2006): 26-33.

"Educating the Peasants: The Ottoman Army and Enlisted Men in Uniform," Middle Eastern Studies, (November 2004): 91-107.