Mehmet Önder Duran

Mehmet Önder Duran is a historian specializing in the modern history of Turkestan. He holds a PhD in History and is affiliated with the Department of History at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, Uşak University, Turkey. He received his BA in History from Selçuk University in 2010 and completed his MA at the same institution as a scholarship recipient of the Turkish Historical Society. He subsequently earned his PhD in 2021 with a dissertation entitled “The Volga Germans on the Turkestan Frontier According to German and Russian Sources.”

During the 2017–2018 academic year, Duran attended Russian language training at Moscow State Pedagogical University and conducted archival research on the history of Turkestan in Moscow. In 2018–2019, he was awarded a TÜBİTAK 2214-A Research Fellowship and served as a visiting researcher at the Osteuropa Institute, Freie Universität Berlin. During this period, he also carried out archival research in Zurich and Basel. In the summer of 2024, he attended the Persian Language Learning Program at Tarbiat Modares University.

His research focuses on the history of Turkestan, with particular interest in modernization processes, the history of the press, biographical studies of political actors, and nationalism and ethnic politics during the Tsarist and Soviet periods. His current research examines “The Turkistan Struggle According to British Archives, 1917–1924.”