Dartmouth Events

Awarded annually for the best thesis written by a student enrolled in the History Department's Honors Program, the 2024 recipient Kaya Çolakoğlu authored a critical analysis of contemporary Turkish political history: "Time, Structure, and the State in the Turkish Years of Lead (1950-1980)." Associate Dean for the Social Sciences Ben Valentino noted: "Çolakoğlu’s thesis is remarkable for his extensive use of original research in Turkish and American archives and for his attention to this implications of his work for theories of Turkish political development. Çolakoğlu also worked closely with a number of untranslated Turkish philosophical texts, which had not been closely studied by scholars outside Turkey. This level of original research and sophisticated engagement with historiography is remarkable in an undergraduate thesis. Çolakoğlu's advsor, Professor Nikpour, writes that his thesis is “groundbreaking” in “its methodological and theoretical agility,” and that it “combines archival and analytical rigor of the highest caliber.”

Begüm Adalet is Assistant Professor in the Department of Government at Cornell University. She is a political theorist with research and teaching interests in infrastructures and ideologies of empire, racism, anti-colonialism, and transnationalism, with a focus on the Cold War period. Their writings have appeared in the American Political Science Review, Political Theory, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, and South Atlantic Quarterly, among others. She is currently working on a second book project, tentatively titled, Insurgent Mood: Radical Internationalism from the United States to the Middle East. Before coming to Cornell, they were Assistant Professor/Faculty Fellow at the Hagop Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies at New York University and Instructor in the Politics Department at Ithaca College. https://government.cornell.edu/begum-adalet