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A native of Ann Arbor, Michigan, James H. Meyer has spent more than three decades studying and living in the Turkish-Russian borderlands. After graduating with a BA in English from McGill University, he worked for seven years as a teacher in Istanbul. In 1999 Meyer returned to the US, completing an MA in Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University (2001) and a PhD in Middle Eastern and Russian History at Brown University (2007). Since 2009, he has taught history at Montana State University, holding the rank of professor since 2024. Meyer's first book, Turks Across Empires, was published by OUP in 2014.
James H. Meyer has written a beautiful book...Thoroughly grounded in multi-country archival research, this book reevaluates the impact of Hikmet and his comrades and offers a fresh approach to writing a transnational history... intelligent and expertly crafted. * Vladimir Hamed-Troyansky, Russian Review * Meyer's meticulously researched book offers the most comprehensive biography of Nâzım Hikmet to date and fills an important gap in the existing literature. It is a solid work of scholarship and gives great inspiration to those intending to contribute to the aforementioned biographical boom in Turkish studies. * Erdem Sönmez, Middle Eastern Studies * A deeply researched biography of Turkey's great 20th century poet, using previously untapped archival sources in Moscow, Istanbul, Amsterdam and Washington. Meyer does not shy away from Nâzım Hikmet's complexities and contradictions, while still recognizing his extraordinary literary talent and boundless reserves of energy. His book does justice to Nâzım's remarkable life story. * William Armstrong, Turkey Book Talk * Meyer's meticulous archival work and delicately historicist reading of Nâzım's literary works in the political contexts of their composition brings us beyond the familiar heroic mythography, providing instead a moving sense of the poet in his own world. As a work of social history dealing with a larger cast of characters, the book is truly capacious, whether it is showing how late Ottoman pan-Turkists contributed to the making of the Soviet East, or documenting how celebrity functioned in the communist nations. * Samuel Hodgkin, Yale University * Placing Nâzım's Hikmet's life and work in its transnational context, Meyer gives readers a sense of the complex ways in which Nâzım's work was a product of both his own genius and a larger revolutionary moment. By drawing connections between the personal, political, and artistic, Red Star over the Black Sea captures the romantic elements of his life without reducing him to an abstract icon, incapable of error or removed from the daily political struggles of his era * Reuben Silverman, New Books Network *
