Long before the Turkish State Opera opened in 1949, Halide Edip Adıvar was mong those imagining what Turkish opera might sound like. In this conversation Jonathan Conlin asks Ici Vanwesenbeeck to explain how this remarkable polymath conceived of an opera that was neither “alla franca” nor “alla turca”.

Amir Moghadam talks to Jonathan Conlin about his ongoing research into Iranian parliamentary discourse, which is shedding new light on the transition from Qajar to Pahlavi regimes.

Ozan Ozavci and Demetra Tzanaki discuss eugenics, a pseudo-science that informed how the Greek state treated displaced fellow Greeks a century ago, and that lies behind our concept of meritocracy.