Edward J. Erickson, PhD
Dr. Edward J. Erickson retired in 2017 as Professor Emeritus of Military History at the Command and Staff College of the Marine Corps University in Quantico, Virginia. Dr. Erickson is a retired lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army and was assigned to the field artillery. He also qualified as a foreign officer specializing in Turkey. During his career, he served in the artillery and general staff in the United States, Europe and the Middle East. He holds master’s degrees from Colgate University and Saint Lawrence University, as well as a doctorate in history from the University of Leeds in the UK. Dr. Erickson is widely recognized as one of the leading specialists on the Ottoman army during the late imperial period. He is the author of sixteen books and numerous articles.
Prof. Dr. Hakan Yavuz
M. Hakan Yavuz is Professor of Political Science at the University of Utah. His current projects deal with transnational Islamic networks in Central Asia and Turkey, the role of Islam in state-building and nationalism, ethnic cleansing and genocide, and ethno-religious conflict management. Yavuz received his primary school education in Ankara and graduated from the Faculty of Political Sciences in Ankara with a Bachelor’s degree. He completed his master’s degree at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and spent a semester at the Hebrew University in Israel (1990). He received his doctorate in political science from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1998. Prof. Dr. Hakan Yavuz is a member of the Advisory Board of the Turkey-based Centre for Eurasian Studies (AVİM) and a member of the Editorial Board of the UK-based Institute for Muslim Minorities.
Prof. Jeremy Salt
After a career in journalism, Jeremy Salt completed a PhD in Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Melbourne in 1980. He then taught the history of the modern Middle East at the university’s Department of Middle Eastern Studies and later the same subject at the Faculty of Political Science.
He then went to Turkey, first to the Bosporus University (Bogazici) in Istanbul and then to Bilkent University in Ankara, where he taught courses on modern history and propaganda in the Middle East. His articles have appeared in numerous journals, including Journal of Palestine Studies, Middle Eastern Studies, Third World Quarterly, Current History and The Muslim World. He has published three books: “Imperialism, Evangelism and the Ottoman Armenians 1878-1896 (1993), “The Unmaking of the Middle East. A History of Western Disorder in Arab Lands” (2008) and “The Last Ottoman Wars. The Human Cost 1877-1923” (2019).
Dr. Dirk Reitz
Dr. Dirk Reitz (born 1966) studied history, political science and law at the universities of Mainz, Münster and Darmstadt after his military service, where he graduated with a Master’s degree in 2001. During his studies, Reitz worked as an assistant to the economic and technical historian Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Frhr. Stromer von Reichenbach is active. He received his doctorate in Darmstadt in 2004 under Prof. Dr. Natalie Fryde with a thesis on the crusades of Louis IX of France. From 2001-2011 he was employed at the Technical University in Darmstadt at the Chair of Medieval History; he represented the chair in 2008/09. Although he is a medievalist by denomination, Reitz sees himself as a military historian, which means he is more “transepochal”. Reitz is a Major in the reserves and has been working in the non-academic field at the German War Graves Commission since 2012, until 2017 as the regional managing director in Saxony, until the end of 2019 as the “Special Representative for the 100th anniversary of the end of the First World War” based in Kassel, and since January 2020 again as the regional managing director in Dresden. He is also a lecturer at Chemnitz University of Technology, where he is working on a habilitation project with Prof. Dr. Frank-Lothar Kroll on the topic of “European peace agreements from 1815 to 1919 – from the principle of reconciliation of interests to the question of guilt”.
Dr. Pat Walsh
Dr. Patrick Walsh is a historian, political analyst and teacher. He has written a number of books on the period from 1890 to 1920, with a particular interest in British foreign policy, the First World War, Germany, Ottoman Turkey, Russia, Armenia and Azerbaijan. His latest publication was “Britain vs Russia in the Caucasus” (2020) and his book on the Second Karabakh War, “44 Days: Karabakh from Occupation to Liberation”. He has also published numerous works on Irish history and the Northern Ireland conflict.
He is interested in Eurasian geopolitics and the domestic politics of the United Kingdom and the USA. Dr. Walsh holds a PhD from Queen’s University Belfast, Department of Political Science and a BSc (Hons) in Geography/History from the University of London. He has participated in numerous academic conferences in Turkey, Azerbaijan, the United Kingdom, the United States and Canada, written for a number of media publications and contributed to television programs on current affairs in various countries. He currently teaches government and politics, economics and geography at a secondary school near Belfast.