In January 2021, my wife-a fellow academic with a much less rose-tinted view of the trade-convinced me to pull my head out of the sand and drop Konuk, the chair of the hiring committee, a line. I nourished my hopes through fall and winter, blaming the lack of good news from Essen on the glacial pace of Teutonic bureaucracy. I was invited for an interview in June 2020 and felt pretty pleased with how I comported myself. Readers wise to the clichés of narrative structure-or, for that matter, of academic life-already know what happened next: I didn’t get the job. Since getting my Ph.D., I’d bounced around from freelance teaching gig to visiting professorship for more than half a decade, and, backwater or not, Essen felt like my big break. A suitable professorship may well appear only once every couple of years, and landing or missing that job could easily make or break a career. Academic jobs, particularly in small fields, are few and far in between. But alas, an academic-especially in a field as quaint as Turkish Studies-is not a chef, a technician, or a hair stylist, people whose skills are always in ample demand and who can theoretically find work wherever they want to live. The one thing giving me pause was the location of Essen, a backwater compared to the cities my work had taken me so far, from San Francisco to Vienna, from Paris to Istanbul. The requirements were stringent and manifold: they were looking for someone whose teaching spanned the entire breadth of the field whose research ranged across multiple epochs and disciplines who had a special interest in Gender Studies had studied and taught in various countries had published prominently and had excellent German, Turkish, and English skills.įrom the moment I laid eyes on the job, I knew we were meant for each other: I had grown up a native speaker of all three languages learned and practiced my trade at top institutions in the UK, US, Turkey, Germany, Austria, and France designed and taught courses on every conceivable aspect of Turkish Studies from art to urbanization and written my articles and books, many with a focus on gender and stretching from the Ottoman Empire to Turkey, for well-respected publishers and journals. It all began in August 2019, when the University of Duisburg-Essen (UDE), Konuk’s German home institution, announced it would be hiring an Associate Professor 3 in Turkish Studies. And perhaps that shouldn’t surprise me: it was I, after all, who got her demoted. After half a year of patience, I have come to the realization that no one will talk about the reasons for Konuk’s demotion, or even the fact of her demotion, if I don’t do it myself.
![uncharted 2 train boss uncharted 2 train boss](https://cdna.artstation.com/p/assets/images/images/007/150/710/4k/jared-sobotta-08.jpg)
To those who could hear it, the silence was deafening. Save for two tiny details-the web page now listed her as “Deputy Director” rather than “Director,” 2 and the title of “Director” vanished from the footer of her e-mails-it seemed as if nothing had changed at all. There was not even a modification to Konuk’s duties as listed on her faculty web page, or to her online CV.
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There was no statement-in protest, support, or otherwise-from any of the academic associations in which Konuk plays a leading role. There was no announcement from Konuk or her university.
![uncharted 2 train boss uncharted 2 train boss](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/5ZIUznmch9M/hqdefault.jpg)
Turner (1829) The Real Academy in Exileīy David Selim Sayers (Paris, France) 1 For Talât Halman The Lost Professorship Ortada bir gerçek varĪT some point between March and April 2021, Kader Konuk, Director of the world’s largest Turkish Studies institute outside of Turkey itself, was quietly stripped of her title.