This webinar will look at the prospects for Turkey's relations with its Western interlocutors (primarily the USA and the European Union) in the aftermath of the US presidential election, months of tension in the Eastern Mediterranean and the Turkey 2020 Report of the European Commission.

The two speakers and the topics they will address are:

Dr Nick Danforth

(Hellenic Foundation for European and Foreign Policy)

'New Beginnings or New Depths: US-Turkish Relations after the Election'

Professor Meltem Müftüler-Baç

(Sabancı University)

'Assessing Turkey's Uncertain Relations with the European Union: Dilemmas of the Past, Prospects for the Future'

Convenor: Professor William Hale (SOAS, emeritus)

Chair: Nick Baird CMG CVO (President of BATAS)

Introduced by Dr Celia Kerslake (Chair of BATAS)

Biographical notes on the speakers

Dr Nick Danforth is a Senior Non-Resident Fellow at the Hellenic Foundation for European and Foreign Policy. Alongside fellowships with the German Marshall Fund and the Woodrow Wilson Center, he previously worked as a senior policy analyst for the Bipartisan Policy Center’s national security program. Danforth received his M.A. from the School of Oriental and African Studies and his B.A. from Yale. He completed his Ph.D. in history at Georgetown University in 2015 and has written widely about Turkey, U.S. foreign policy, and the Middle East for publications including The Atlantic, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, New York Times and Washington Post.

Professor Meltem Müftüler-Baç is currently Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, Professor of International Relations and Jean Monnet chair ad personam at Sabancı University, Istanbul. She received her BA in Political Science from Boğaziçi University in 1988 and her MA and PhD in Political Science and International Relations from Temple University, USA in 1989 and 1992 respectively. Before joining Sabancı University in 2002 she taught at Temple University and at Bilkent University, Ankara, and has had visiting positions at the Universities of Chicago, Stockholm and Pennsylvania. At Sabancı University Professor Müftüler-Baç coordinated the Social and Political Studies undergraduate program from 2002 to 2011, established the masters program in European Studies and coordinated it from 2004 to 2014, and established and coordinated the BA program in International Studies from 2011 to 2014.

Professor Müftüler-Baç has authored multiple academic books, notably Turkey's Relations with a Changing Europe (Manchester University Press, 1997}and Divergent Pathways: Turkey and the European Union (Barbara Budrich, 2016). She co-edited (with Yannis Stivachtis) Turkey and the European Union Relations: Dilemmas, Opportunities and Constraints (Lexington Books, 2008) and (with Jan Wouters and Kolja Raube) Parliamentary Cooperation and Diplomacy in EU External Relations (2019). Her work has been consistently supported by the EU’s research programs. In 2004 she was awarded the ad personam title of Jean Monnet Professor by the European Commission. In 2011 she received a grant from the European Commission for a Jean Monnet Center of Excellence. Her work, which includes articles in a wide range of international academic journals, is widely cited in discussion of Turkey-EU relations, EU enlargement, Turkish foreign policy and Turkish politics. It can be accessed via her website http://myweb.sabanciuniv.edu/muftuler, ResearchGate and her Google Scholar page.