TÜBA Honorary Member Prof. Dr. İsenbike Togan Given Authority by UIA for The Representation of ‘International Academies Union In Relations With Central Asia’…
TÜBA Honorary Member Prof. Dr. İsenbike Togan has been given the right to represent the International Union of Academies (UIA) in ‘Relations With Central Asia’.
Who is Prof. Dr. İsenbike Togan?
After finishing secondary education in Istanbul German High School, she graduated from Istanbul University Faculty of Literature Department of History (1964). İsenbike Togan studied General Turkish History, Persian Language and Literature and Turkish Art; between the years 1964 and 1966, in order to study Turkish history from Chinese resources, she was given scholarship by Nationalist China in order to study Chinese in the National Taiwan University (Taiwan) for a year and to continue postgraduate work. In 1967-68, during her Chinese lectorate work in the Istanbul University Faculty of Literature, she started doctorate study in Ankara Language-History Geography Faculty, but after a short while she went to Harvard University in the United States of America (USA) with a Fulbright scholarship. In 1968-73, completing her doctorate studies on Central Asian history from Turkish Mongolian and Chinese resources, she studied a system applied in China during the Mongolian Era which was similar to the Ottoman manorial system and graduated from the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations with her doctoral thesis "The Chapter on Annual Grants in the Yüan shih" (1973).
After returning to Turkey, between 1974-78 Prof. Dr.Togan gave Turkish Culture History and Mongolian lessons as an instructor in the Hacettepe University Turkish Language and History department, and during this time between 1975 and 1976 she made studies in Harvard Center for Middle Eastern Studies. In the years after that, between 1978-84, she was a lecturer in the Middle Eastern Technical University (METU) Department of Political Sciences and Public Administration and during that period (1980-82) got a MEAwards (Middle Eastern Award) scholarship and carried out a study among Sudanese nomads. In 1984 when METU Department of History was formed, she was transferred to this department and started giving classes about the Middle Ages. Afterwards she went to the USA and in order to make researches in the Harvard University Fairbank Center for East Asian Research, the Harvard Middle Eastern Center between 1985 and 1987, gave classes between 1987-89 at Wellesley and Tufts University. In 1989, with a Rockefeller scholarship, became a fellow in the Washington University in St. Louis Center for the Study of Islamic Societies and Civilizations. She gave lectures until 1992 in Washington University Department of History on Central Asian, Near Eastern and Chinese history. In 1990 she became a member of UNESCO International Scientific Committee for the drafting of a History of Civilizations of Central Asia and in the same years, for UNESCO’s Integral Study of the Silk Roads project studied the People’s Republic of China in 1990 and Soviet Era Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kazakhstan and Kirghizia. In the summer of 1992 she returned to Turkey and started associate professorship on the Middle Ages in METU and in 1995 became a professor. Prof. İsenbike Togan became a TÜBA Member of Honor in 2007.