Moderated by Jeffrey Wasserstrom
Kaya Genç, a European Press Prize finalist whose tech reporting for Rest of World has received a grant from Ford Foundation, is the author of four books:The Lion and the Nightingale (Bloomsbury Academic, 2019), Under the Shadow (I.B. Tauris, 2016), An Istanbul Anthology (American University in Cairo Press, 2015) and Macera (YKY, 2008). Kaya has contributed to the world’s leading journals and newspapers, including two front page stories in The New York Times, and cover stories in The New York Review of Books, The Nation, Foreign Affairs, The Believer, and The Times Literary Supplement. A critic for Artforum and Art in America, he has been a contributing editor at Index on Censorship since 2013 and at The Dial since 2024. He is also the Istanbul correspondent of Los Angeles Review of Books. According to The Village Voice few books of analysis published about contemporary Turkey come close to Kaya’s work ‘for sheer humanism and breadth of perspective’; Journal of Contemporary European Studies called him ‘a juggler of paradoxes, an assailer of conventional wisdoms and a challenger of foolish optimism’; and The Millions wrote: ‘Genç is arguably the most important Turkish writer writing in English still living in Turkey.’
Jeffrey Ngo is a historian, writer, and pro-democracy activist based out of Washington, where he’s a Ph.D. candidate and instructor at Georgetown University. His articles have appeared in such outlets as the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Time, Dissent, Slate, and the Hong Kong Free Press. A specialist in the Pacific World, Ngo has broad research and teaching interests in Chinese maritime and territorial frontiers, the Qing Empire, colonial and postcolonial Vietnam, as well as U.S. foreign affairs. Ngo has been affiliated with the Hong Kong Democracy Council since its 2019 establishment, first as an advisor and now as a senior policy and research fellow.
