The Fund for the Support of Historical Research, created with the kind assistance of Dr. Alper Öktem in 2010 aimed at promoting and supporting research geared towards revealing scrupulous acts of conscience which can be evaluated as human rights defence during the 1915 events and today. As of 2013, the scope of the fund, renamed as ‘History and Memory Research Fund,’ has been enhanced to include research on memory and the relationship between memory and history. In addition to its initial scope, the fund will also support research on the traces of the events of 1915, their memory on subsequent generations and the different ways of remembering.

The History and Memory Research Fund 2016 grantees were announced at the beginning of the General Evaluation and Discussions session of the Conference on The Social, Cultural and Economic History of Van and the Region held at the Hrant Dink Foundation, Anarad Hığutyun Building, Havak Hall on 11-12 November 2016.

The Fund’s Jury consists of Hülya Adak (Sabancı University), Taner Akçam (Clark University), Ayşe Gül Altınay (Sabancı University), Ayfer Bartu Candan (Boğaziçi University), Valentina Calzolari (Université de Genève), Edhem Eldem (Boğaziçi University), Deniz Kandiyoti (University of London), Raymond Kévorkian (Université Paris-VIII), Kerem Öktem (University of Graz), Arus Yumul (Istanbul Bilgi University).

The History and Memory Research Fund was shared among two researches for the 2016 funding year. The grantees and their projects are:

• Hazal Halavut - Türk Edebiyatı Felaketi: Failin Edebiyatında Soykırım, Yasa ve Tanıklık [Turkish Literature Disaster: Genocide in the Literature of Perpetrator, Law and Testimony]
• Bengi Güldoğan & Deanna Cachoian-Schanz - «Չünքüşաbaտum (Çüngüşabadoum)» Reflecting on Absence and Presence, Objects and Archives: (Re)imagining a Shared Unknown Past in Çüngüş

HAZAL HALAVUT: Hazal Halavut received her BA degree in Social Anthropology at Istanbul University in 2005, and continued her MA in Sociology at Boğaziçi University. In 2007, she attended the doctoral program of Sociology and Women studies at York University in Toronto. In 2012, she received a MA degree in Comparative Literature from Istanbul Bilgi University. Since 2012, she continues her doctoral studies on Turkish Language and Literature at Boğaziçi University. 

BENGİ GÜLDOĞAN: Bengi Güldoğan received her BA degree at Istanbul Technical University, Faculty of Architecture in 2008, and her master and PhD degrees in the Architectural Design program. She was a research assistant at MEF University between 2014 and 2016.

DEANNA CACHOIAN-SCHANZ: Deanna Cachoian-Schanz received her MA degree in Armenian Language and Literature from Universita Ca Foscari Venezia in 2013. Since 2014, she is a graduate student in Cultural Studies at Sabancı University.

Information about Dr. Alper Öktem, the supporter of the History and Memory Research Fund
Born on 11 March 1954 in the Turkish town of Dikili, he finished his primary education in Burdur. He started to pursue his secondary education at the Maarif Koleji in Eskişehir, continued in Konya and finished it in Istanbul at the Kadıköy Maarif Koleji. In 1978, he graduated from Faculty of Medicine at Hacettepe University in Ankara. He went to Germany for specialization in radiology. In the 1980s he helped Turkish refugees who underwent torture. He has been supporting the Human Rights Foundation of Turkey for more than twenty years. Moreover, he is a board member of the Democratic Turkey Forum in Germany. Dr. Öktem has been assisting Cem Özdemir, Co-Chairman of the Unity 90/Green Party, especially on the topics of human rights, peace and democracy in Turkey, ever since Özdemir was first voted into parliament in 1993. In 2000-2001 he published the weekly supplement Perşembe for the German daily newspaper Die Tageszeitung. Perşembe aimed at bringing together German society and migrants on equal ground in the same media platform, making migrants equal members of society, especially through deepening the dialogue in the media, and reporting human rights violations in Turkey. Dr. Alper Öktem is married, has two children and lives in Bielefeld, Germany, where he works as a radiologist.