Alan Duben

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Alan Duben was born in New York City in 1943. He is an emeritus professor of anthropology at Istanbul Bilgi University. He first came to Turkey in 1964 as a Peace Corps Volunteer and stayed for two years in central and eastern Anatolia where he taught English as a second language in Turkish middle and high schools. In 1966 he began PhD studies in anthropology at the University of Chicago. Between 1969 and 1971 he conducted dissertation research in Istanbul and in the town of Divrigi in east-central Anatolia. He received his PhD degree in 1973. During the subsequent decades he taught at New York University (1972-76), Bogazici University (1977-1990), was a research fellow at Hunter College – City University of New York (1991-99), taught at Hamilton College (New York, 1996), European University Viadrina (Germany, 2011), and Istanbul Bilgi University from 1999 to his retirement in 2021. Among his many publications are Istanbul Households: Marriage, Family, and Fertility (1991, with C. Behar), City, Family, History (2002, in Turkish), and Aging and the Elderly: Interdisciplinary Perspectives (2018, in Turkish).

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Duben has been engaged in research on the memorialization of Jews in Polish society since 2014.