A Tanzimat for TSA

A Tanzimat for TSA Mark Stein (bio) On a very rainy day in June 2012 I had lunch with Amy Mills in Kuzguncuk.1 I was in Istanbul with students on a short-term study abroad program. The students had read Amy's work on Kuzguncuk in class and we were lucky enough to get Amy to give us a tour of the neighborhood, unluckily in the pouring rain. Over lunch the conversation turned to the Turkish Studies Association. Amy had become Secretary-Treasurer the previous year and I was completing my second term as a board member. At the time, and despite the best efforts of a very dedicated board, the organization was in terrible shape. Most of TSA's money had been embezzled by an administrative assistant several years before and our finances had not recovered. The Turkish Studies Association Journal, our flagship publication, was without an editor and had not been published since 2005, although there was a draft of a volume that had been passed along to a series of volunteer editors who had tried to bring it to press. The lack of the journal led many long-time members to let their membership lapse and kept many potential new members from joining. Although we maintained a membership list of almost 400 names, most of those were people who historically had been members. Actual paid membership was less than a third of that number. Yet we perceived, in conversations with colleagues at MESA, and at the still vibrant dialogue at our annual meetings, that great passion and care for the present and future for TSA continued to exist: many people were devoted to our organization which could support and inspire excellent scholarship in unique ways, together with a vibrant scholarly community. Amy as Secretary-Treasurer had made serious inroads in cleaning up the books and keeping TSA going but there was still a lot to be done. She had inherited this position from Paul Khaldjian, who had been serving in this capacity for years, with some administrative support from his institution. Yet it was clear that a single person could not handle the amount of work involved in [End Page 11] facilitating meetings, maintaining minutes and other documentation, receiving and processing funds and expenses, and handling most of the communication for the organization. During our work together on the board, it became clear that there was a solid commitment on the part of the board members, as well as of many of the past leaders of the TSA, to share knowledge and information and work to regenerate the organization. Over the course of that lunch Amy convinced me to stand for election for president and shortly after that she convinced Heather Ferguson to become treasurer after TSA separated the jobs of secretary and Treasurer. We were elected in the Fall of 2012 and, together with board members Kyle Evered, Christine Philliou, Elyse Semerdjian, Brian Silverstein, and Past-President Şükrü Hanioğlu we started the process of reviving the organization and transforming its identity better to reflect the realities of our field. Reşat Kasaba, a recent past TSA president, graciously shared his time and institutional memory to help support a collaborative effort to think through what was needed to reinvigorate our organization The first order of business was to publish an issue of the journal. Andras Reidlmayer had done a significant editing of the materials in hand and had passed them on to Şükrü who worked them over again. The printer with whom we had a contract was very slow to return proofs and eventually only did so after we asked for our money back from them. Unfortunately, there were major errors in the proofs. Passages from one article were placed in other articles and the entire text was riddled with typographical errors. Another problem was that the contributors to the issue were, quite rightly, upset as they had been waiting years to see their scholarship in print and it was an issue in some of their tenure and promotion processes. I had lengthy correspondence with them asking for a bit more time and thanking them for their extreme patience. Şükrü again worked through the proofs

Political science · Families in Therapy and Culture · History · Islamic Thought and Society Studies · Ottoman and Turkish Studies