Allied Occupied Istanbul and the Ottoman War Crimes Tribunals, 1919-20

This talk rethinks the Ottoman Extraordinary Military Tribunals (1919-20), convened in Allied-occupied Istanbul to prosecute atrocities against Armenians. Positioned between retributive justice and nationalist resistance, the tribunals generated archival fragments that reveal both juridical limits and the cultural afterlives of genocide. Trial records, later preserved in the Guerguerian Archive, document not only state violence but also the condition of "remnants"-survivors marked by dispossession, conversion, and assimilation. Reread affectively, these fragments disclose how mourning, testimony, and denial circulate beyond legal frameworks. The tribunals, though later discredited, remain spectral sites of justice shaping memory, historiography, and post-imperial nation-building. Presenter: Erdağ Göknar is Associate Professor of Turkish 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; specifically, on late Ottoman legacies in modern and contemporary Turkish fiction, historiography, and popular culture. His recent research examines intersections of law and literature in Allied occupied Istanbul (1918-23). Moderator and Commentator: Kata Gellen, Associate Professor of German Studies and Director of the Center for Jewish Studies.