Nick Baird (President) joined the Foreign Office in 1983 and had a long and illustrious career, including a posting as the Ambassador in Ankara from 2006-2009. Since leaving the FCO, he has taken up a post as group corporate affairs director of energy firm Centrica, and is also a Trustee of Kew Gardens and the President of BATAS.
Elif Toker-Turnalar (Chairperson, Joint Treasurer, TAS Journal Editorial Team) is a researcher, lecturer, public speaker and specialist in Political Communication, Turkish Politics and Public Relations. She has an MA from Boğaziçi University in Political Science and International Relations, where she completed her thesis on “The formal role of the military in political decision making: Egypt and Turkey”, and a BA from Middlesex University in Politics, History and TEFL. At present she holds a Lectureship post at Regent’s University, London. She is engaged with colleagues on a 10-year longitudinal study of digital literacy and the understanding of politics and news by young adults, with an emphasis on social media platforms, mainly Facebook. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/2056305118803895
Polly Davies (Administrative Secretary) is a lawyer specialising primarily in maritime law. She trained and worked at former leading maritime law firm Ince & Co and is now based at STREAM Law in Paris. During her career she has also held anti-corruption and human rights in supply chain related roles. She has an undergraduate degree in Turkish with Islamic Art and Archaeology and an MPhil in Social Anthropology, for which her thesis focused on education in Tajikistan, both from the University of Oxford. She has traveled extensively in Turkey and is a Turkish and French speaker.
Professor William Hale (Joint Treasurer) is an Emeritus Professor in the Department of Political and International Studies at SOAS, and a former Professor with special reference to the politics of Turkey in the Department. He is the author of The Political and Economic Development of Modern Turkey (1981, repr.2015), Turkish Politics and the Military (1994), Turkish Foreign Policy 1774-2000 (2000, 3rd edn Turkish Foreign Policy since 1774, 2012), Turkey, the United States and Iraq ( 2006) and Islamism, Democracy and Liberalism, The Case of the AKP (co-authored with Ergun Özbudun, 2011) besides numerous articles on Turkey’s politics and foreign relations.
Suna Akartuna (Joint Treasurer and Membership Secretary) is a Senior Compliance Manager at Fidelity International, specialised in marketing communications and distribution of pension, investment products compliance. A founder member of ATA (Anglo-Turkish Association of Academic & Professionals) and the +1 Turkiye. Studied in Petroleum Eng (BSc.) and Natural Gas Eng. (MSc.) at Middle East Technical University and Management of Information System (MSc.) at the London School of Economics and Political Science
Dr Natalie Martin (Public Relations Officer) is an alumnus of Modern Turkish Studies at SOAS and was a BBC journalist before doing a PhD in Turkey-EU relations at Loughborough University. She is now an assistant professor at the University of Nottingham. Her work focuses on Turkey-EU and democratisation processes including the news media. She is also looking at how disinformation is used to target the news media in Turkey and elsewhere. She is the author of numerous articles on Turkey and two monographs: Security and the Turkey-EU Accession Process: Norms, Reforms and the Cyprus Issue (2015) and The Securitisation of News in Turkey: Journalists as Terrorists? (2020).
Sigrid Martin-Wünscher (TAS Journal Editor) studied German & Politics at Göttingen (Germany) and Southampton universities, became a Lecturer in German at Kent University (1969) and was responsible for some 25 years for an MA Translation course which included Turkish as an option. Her own involvement with Turkiye started with a Kent-Boğaziçi academic exchange, leading to her development of a course on Turkish authors writing in German.
Dr Gemma Masson (TAS Journal Editorial Team) studied BA History and MA History of War, Culture and Society at the University of Portsmouth before becoming interested in Ottoman history and moving to Birmingham for a PhD in Ottoman Studies. Working under Rhoads Murphey, Marios Hadjianastasis and Arezou Azad she completed a thesis on Janissary identity in eighteenth century Istanbul. During this time she studied in Turkey with a TUBITAK scholarship and became involved with Hnet. She now works as Assistant Editor of the Islam and Christian-Muslim Relations Journal as well as Editing HFolk and HEmpire. She is also an Associate Fellow of the Higher Education Academy and has worked with groups and projects such as ASTENE, Travelers in Ottoman Lands and the Anglo-Turkish Society.
Aslı Kandemir (TAS Journal Editorial Team) is a critical sociologist and an interdisciplinary researcher. She is currently working in the School of Education at the University of Birmingham on a study examining freedom of expression in English schools. Dr Kandemir holds a PhD in Sociology from Liverpool Hope University and researches ‘race’/ethnicity and immigration, education policy, and intersectional inequalities. Her forthcoming book, Tolerance and Symbolic Borders: British-Turkish Identity, Values, and Community Cohesion, is published by Bristol University Press (2025). Dr Kandemir also works on equitable mentoring and volunteers as an academic mentor to university students, academics and professionals. She is a former radio DJ and an avid capoeirista.
Tuğçe Bıçakçı-Syed (TAS Journal Editorial Team) is an independent literary scholar, editor, and writer based in Birmingham, UK. She holds a PhD in English (2018) and an MA in Contemporary Literary Studies (2013) from the University of Lancaster, both fully funded by the Turkish Ministry of Education. Her research focuses on the Gothic mode in Turkish literature and film, exploring its historical development in relation to ideological, cultural, and political shifts, with a strong foundation in literary and cultural theory. She has published critical essays on popular genres in Turkish literature and cinema, as well as on representations of Turkish identity in Anglophone narratives. Her recent publications include “Global Gothic 1: Islamic Gothic” in The Cambridge History of the Gothic: Volume 3 – Gothic in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries (Cambridge University Press, 2021) and “Gothicising the Ottoman Past and Building Modern Turkey in Turkish Gothic Novels of the 1920s” in Middle Eastern Gothics: Literature, Spectral Modernities and the Restless Past (University of Wales Press, 2022).
Dr Çiǧdem Balım (Council Member) is a Distinguished Senior Researcher at Indiana University’s Center for the Study of the Middle East (CSME), and a senior examiner for the International Baccalaureate Organization. She worked at Hacettepe University, and as the Chair of the Department of Foreign Language Teacher Education at Gazi University. Between 1988 – 2004 she was at the University of Manchester, where she served as the Chair of the Department of Middle Eastern Studies and taught Turkish language and linguistics at BA and MA level. She has edited and contributed to eight books on Turkic Studies, has over fifty articles and book contributions. She lives in Manchester.
Professor Yaprak Gürsoy (Council Member) is the Chair of Contemporary Turkish Studies at the European Institute of the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). Prior to her current post, she was a senior lecturer in the Department of Politics and International Relations at Aston University (2017-2021) and an Associate Professor at Istanbul Bilgi University (2009-2017). Professor Gürsoy works on Turkish domestic politics and foreign policy from a comparative perspective. She is the author of Between Military Rule and Democracy: Regime Consolidation in Greece, Turkey, and Beyond (University of Michigan Press, 2017). Professor Gürsoy’s complete academic profile can be found on her personal website: www.yaprakgursoy.com.
Michael J L Berthoud (Council Member)
Bülent Gökay (Council Member)
Buket Konuk-Hirst (Technology Officer) has a strong background in data science and analytics. She volunteers for NGOs and Associations in her home country of Türkiye, as well as across the U.K. and Europe. She is responsible for IT affairs in BATAS.
