Mehmet Doğar
MSc (METU)
College roles
Skilliter Centre Postgraduate Researcher
Biography
Mehmet Doğar studied at the Department of International Relations, Middle East Technical University, Ankara. His Master’s thesis, supervised by Professor Ebru Boyar, was on Turkish-Italian diplomatic relations between 1932 and 1939, with a specific focus on the Turkish perception and portrayal of the Italian threat. He is now doing a Ph.D. in the Faculty of History at the University of Cambridge, where he is generously funded by a Harding Distinguished Postgraduate Scholarship. For his dissertation, under the supervision of Dr Kate Fleet, he is working on bilateral relations between Turkey and Italy in the interwar period from a socioeconomic history perspective.
Research Interests
His research interests include the socio-economic history of the late Ottoman Empire and the early Turkish Republic and Turkish foreign policy in the interwar period (specifically relations with Italy and Britain). He is also interested in Italian foreign policy and imperialism in the early twentieth century, the workings of fascist Italian economic policy on the ground, and the diplomatic history of interwar Europe and the Mediterranean in general. He supervises students on twentieth century European and global history.
He previously published an article on the state-press relationship in the early Turkish Republic, examining the role of the Turkish press during the Italian invasion of Ethiopia 1935-36: “‘Complete Neutrality’ or ‘Controlled Enmity’? The Role of the Turkish Press during the Italo-Ethiopian War of 1935-36”, Turkish Historical Review, 10 (2-3) (2019), pp. 213-51. His recent article, “The Place of Italy in Turkish Foreign Policy in the 1930s”, Middle Eastern Studies, 58 (1) (2022), pp. 48-69, examines the nature of bilateral relations between Turkey and Italy in the 1930s and challenges the widely accepted axiom that the Italian threat dominated the formation of Turkish foreign policy in this period.