Role: Author

Mr Mehmet Polatel is a historian focussing on late Ottoman history and early Turkish republic. He has conducted research on the fate of Armenian property in the Ottoman Empire and the Republic of Turkey. Currently he is a PhD student at Bogaziçi University and a research assistant at the History Department of Koç University in Istanbul.

Mehruss Jon Ahi is an architectural designer, real estate developer, graphic artist, and the co-founder and creative director of the online publication Interiors.

Matthew Spender is a writer and sculptor. He married the eldest daughter of Arshile Gorky in 1968. His previous book, Within Tuscany, is a memoir about the Sienese countryside where they live.

France is the only Western European nation home to substantial numbers of survivors of the World War I and World War II genocides. In the Aftermath of Genocide offers a unique comparison of the country’s Armenian and Jewish survivor communities. By demonstrating how—in spite of significant differences between these two populations—striking similarities emerge in the ways each responded to genocide, Maud S. Mandel illuminates the impact of the nation-state on ethnic and religious minorities in twentieth-century Europe and provides a valuable theoretical framework for considering issues of transnational identity. Investigating each community’s response to its violent past, Mandel reflects on how shifts in ethnic, religious, and national affiliations were influenced by that group’s recent history. The book examines these issues in the context of France’s long commitment to a politics of integration and homogenization—a politics geared toward the establishment of equal rights and legal status for all citizens, but not toward the accommodation of cultural diversity.\