Halit Dundar Akarca holds a PhD in Near Eastern Studies from Princeton University. Before joining Nazarbayev University, he was as a post-doctoral fellow at the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard University, and a teaching fellow at the Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies at New York University. He is specialized in Ottoman-Russian relations in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Currently he is working on two book-length projects. The first project analyzes the roles of local and Russian imperial organizations in the formation of an imperial structure in Eastern Anatolia during World War I. The second project analyzes the role of ground-level actors of Russian imperialism in the Ottoman territories in the 19th century. At Nazarbayev University he teaches History of Kazakhstan, History of the Ottoman Empire, History of Modern Turkey, History of World War I, and History of the Middle East.
