Born in 1947, Halil Berktay has been a full professor at Ibn Haldun University since May 2017.       He was a member of the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at Sabancı University between 1998 and 2016. Berktay, currently, is in office as an emeritus professor since January 31, 2016.

Professor Berktay served as History Program Coordinator, Turkish Studies Program Coordinator, Sabancı Summer School Coordinator, and  Sabancı-Harvard Summer School Coordinator at the same university. Berktay earned his BA and MA degrees in Economics from Yale University (USA) in 1968, and his PhD in History from University of Birmingham, UK, in 1991. Professor Berktay has also taught (as an assistant or junior lecturer) in the Faculty of Political Sciences at Ankara University; as, a full-time academic, at the Middle East Technical University and Boğaziçi University; and, as a visiting professor, at Michigan (Ann Arbor) as well as, on two separate occasions at Harvard University in 1997 and in 2007-2008. Berktay’s research interests include: historiography (general and Turkish); debates over  pre-capitalist modes of production and theories of feudalism; attempts  at conceptualizing the Ottoman social formation; the formation of  Turkish nationalism and national memory; revolutions and military  takeovers; the Turkish revolutions in comparative perspective; the human  costs of modernity and the nation-state; remembering and forgetting;  history curricula and textbooks in the Balkans; history of Marxism and  socialism.