Heath W Lowry

Career

Lowry spent two years (1964–1966) working as a Peace Corps volunteer in a remote mountain village Bereketli, Balıkesir Province in western Turkey before graduating from Portland State University (1966). In the late '60s, he worked with scholars Speros Vryonis, Jr., Andreas Tietze, Gustav von Grunebaum, and Stanford J. Shaw at the University of California Los Angeles, where he received both his master's degree (1970) and Ph.D. (1977).

Lowry was a founding member of the Department of History at the Boğaziçi University in İstanbul, Turkey, and taught there full-time from 1973 until 1980. In 1980, he co-founded The Journal of Ottoman Studies, together with Nejat Göyünç and Halil İnalcık. He also served as the Istanbul Director of the American Research Institute in Turkey from 1972-1979.

Lowry then took a position as Senior Research Associate at Harvard University’s Dumbarton Oaks Research Library & Collection in Washington, D.C. between 1980 and 1983. There, he co-directed a team of international scholars working on late Byzantine and early Ottoman historical demography. In 1983, with a group of scholars, businessmen, and retired diplomats and a grant from the Turkish government, he helped establish, and became the director of, the Institute of Turkish Studies at Georgetown University, which provides grants to scholars working in the area of Turkish studies. During this time, he began to study contemporary Turkish politics, and taught from 1989-1994 at the U.S. State Department's National Foreign Affairs Training Center in Arlington, Virginia, where his students were U.S. diplomats scheduled for assignment in Turkey. He served as Course Chairperson of the Advanced Area Studies Program on Turkey, Greece, and Cyprus.

From 1993 to 2013, Lowry was the Atatürk Professor of Ottoman and Modern Turkish Studies at Princeton University, and served as the Director of the Program of Near Eastern Studies from July 1994 to June 1997. He offered seminars on early Ottoman history and undergraduate lecture courses on Ottoman history and contemporary Turkey. In 1996, Princeton was accused of allowing itself to be used by the Turkish government as a disseminator of propaganda when the university accepted a $750,000 donation from the Government of Turkey and subsequently appointed Lowry, who denied the existence of the Turkish Armenian Genocide in World War I.

In 2010, Lowry became a Distinguished Visiting Professor at Bahçeşehir University in Turkey, where he directs the Center for Ottoman Era Studies. He is currently a Professor Emeritus at Princeton, and he simultaneously serves as an Advisor to the Chairman of the Bahçeşehir Board of Trustees.

Scholarly reviews

In a 44-page long article published in the Journal of Ottoman Studies in 1986 (initially presented as a paper at a conference at MESA), Lowry wrote a review against historian Richard G. Hovannisian for his depiction of a junior American intelligence officer in his second volume on the history of the First Republic of Armenia. Though it only occupied the space of a single footnote in a 603-page book, Lowry thought the alleged mischaracterizations by Hovannisian to be so egregious as to have compromised his scholarly integrity. Lowry took issue with the favorable reviews of the book by other historians such as Firuz Kazemzadeh and Roderic Davison and charged Hovannisian with distorting facts and displaying partiality in his work. In a point-by-point rebuttal published in the same year, Hovannisian expressed surprise at Lowry's outrage and decision to single out the depiction of one individual and use it as the sole basis to discredit his research. He went on to criticize Lowry for exaggerating the scope of minor errors, misinterpreting the sources and failing to grasp nuances found in the primary source material, which in many cases agreed with what he had originally written.

In 1990, Lowry claimed that Ambassador Morgenthau's Story was a record of "crude half-truths and outright falsehoods". According to Yair Auron, Lowry is recognized as a principal source discrediting Morgenthau, giving "impetus to the Turkish endeavor to deny the Armenian Genocide." Fellow Armenian Genocide denier Guenter Lewy also shares Lowry's main conclusions about Morgenthau's Memoirs.

Criticism

David B. MacDonald, of the Political Science department at the University of Guelph in Ontario, has labeled Lowry as one of the key deniers of the Armenian Genocide. In 1985, Lowry was involved in organizing 69 academics to sign a letter expressing their opposition to official US recognition of the genocide.

Turkish ambassador incident

In 1990, psychologist Robert Jay Lifton received a letter from the Turkish Ambassador to the United States, Nuzhet Kandemir, questioning his inclusion of references to the Armenian Genocide in one of his books. The ambassador inadvertently included a draft of a letter written by Lowry advising the ambassador on how to prevent mention of the Armenian Genocide in scholarly works. Roger W. Smith, Eric Markusen and Lifton also state they caught Lowry "ghosting" for the Turkish ambassador in Washington regarding the denial of the Armenian Genocide. The incident has been brought up as example of the issue of ethics in scholarship.

In 1996, Lowry admitted in an interview that the letter to the Ambassador was a mistake. However, he continues to deny the genocide.

Princeton appointment protests

In 1995, Lifton, Smith, and Markusen published an article criticizing Lowry's behavior in the academic journal Holocaust and Genocide Studies. In February of that year, a group of 100 scholars and writers published a denunciation the Turkish Government and Lowry in the The Chronicle of Higher Education. The signatories of the document included Alfred Kazin, Norman Mailer, Arthur Miller, Joyce Carol Oates, Susan Sontag, William Styron, David Riesman and John Updike.

The following year, Princeton University was publicly accused of accepting bribes to cater to Turkish propaganda, and multiple scholars protested Lowry's appointment to chair of the department. Peter Balakian, a professor at Colgate University, described Lowry's work as "evil euphemistic evasion," and organized a protest of 200 Armenian-Americans at the Princeton Club in New York City. The Princeton dean of faculty, Amy Gutmann, defended the university's actions by stating that donations do not influence the appointment process.

Awards

Lowry received an honorary doctorate from the Bosphorus University in 1985. In 1986, he was awarded the TÜTAV (Foundation for the Promotion and Recognition of Turkey) Prize. He was made a Corresponding Member of the Turkish Historical Society in 1988. From 2000 to 2001, Lowry was Senior Fulbright Research Scholar at Bilkent University, in Ankara, Turkey.

Works