Taner Akçam

Taner Akçam — Biography

Altuğ Taner Akçam is a Turkish-German historian and sociologist born on 23 October 1953 in the village of Ölçek in Ardahan Province. A graduate of the Middle East Technical University's Faculty of Administrative Sciences, he co-founded several student organizations in the 1970s and served as editor-in-chief of the magazine Devrimci Gençlik from 1975. Arrested in 1976 over its content, he was sentenced to nine years in prison and escaped from prison in 1977, fleeing to Germany.

Akçam lived in Germany as a political refugee between 1978 and 1995, joining the Hamburg Institute for Social Research in 1988 and completing a doctorate at the University of Hannover in 1995 on the Committee of Union and Progress trials and the Armenian genocide. He later moved to the United States, where he now teaches at the University of Minnesota's Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies and writes a regular column for the news outlet Medyascope.

One of the first Turkish scholars to publicly acknowledge the Armenian genocide, Akçam is the author of books including A Shameful Act (1999), From Empire to Republic (2004), The Young Turks' Crime Against Humanity (2012) and Killing Orders (2018), and is widely regarded as a leading international authority on the subject. He has argued for reconciling the differing Armenian and Turkish narratives of the genocide rather than reinforcing national stereotypes.