Merhaba!

Hello!

Welcome to the course blog for the Elon Honors winter term travel seminar to Turkey. Our students will be posting about the things we will be doing, seeing, experiencing, and learning while in Turkey. 

In this course, students develop the tools to investigate the long history of Turkey as both an “eastern” and “western” culture and to probe the meanings signified in these categories. The course is deliberately situated within the middle of a first-year Honors curriculum when students have completed Global Studies and are equipped with conceptual tools for thinking about the world, and before they enter a discipline-based Spring-semester course.  

Students will visit sites of historical and contemporary significance to life in Turkey, engage readings that amplify their understanding of several academic “problems” relevant to Turkish studies, reflect in writing on a number of topics that pertain to our readings and site visits, and probe one or several related questions on a topic of their choosing.  Among the topics of central importance to the course are nationalism and imperialism and the identities associated with these categories, East vs. West or East and West?, the construction of identity in terms of religion and gender, and Turkey’s relationships to its past. 

The Honors travel seminar began going to Turkey in 2013. After four years in Turkey, we pivoted to Italy, which was likewise an amazing place to study questions related to identity, nationalism, and imperialism. However, we are excited to return to Turkey! We invite you to keep up with us and our adventures, and even to comment!

The first cohort to Turkey, 2013.