History at IHU

About History Department and Programs

Ibn Haldun, who was perhaps the most distinguished among the giants of thought of the 14th century, was a historian, a historian of historiography, a sociologist, a demographer—in short, he had a versatile, multidimensional genius. Today, almost 650 years after he retired to write his Muqaddimah, the History programs at Turkey's and Istanbul's new Ibn Haldun University aim to produce a similarly complex, multifaceted, interdisciplinary, comparative and sociological richness; in this way, it aims to transcend either Eurocentric or West-centric or narrowly Ottoman-Turkish oriented approaches.

In this framework, as of the Fall semester of 2017, (a) our Turkish Studies Master's (MA) program with and without thesis, and (b) our History Undergraduate (BA) program, which is built around three tracks, came into play. These were followed by our History Doctorate (PhD) program in the Fall 2018 semester. In all of them, advanced command of English, which is the main language of instruction, and Modern Turkish is essential. On top of these sit Ottoman Turkish, Arabic and Persian as three indispensable research languages. On top of these robust language skills, too, the Bachelor's, Master's, and Doctoral curricula rise, which fuse the most rigorous empirical research standards with broad theoretical horizons.