Taner Akçam

Taner Akçam - "sociologist, historian and writer - was born in Ardahan province, Turkey, in 1953. He was granted political asylum in Germany after receiving a ten-year prison sentence for his involvement in revolutionary politics, which resulted in his adoption in 1976 by Amnesty International as a prisoner of conscience. He is the author of ten scholarly works of history and sociology, as well as numerous articles in Turkish, German and English. His latest publication is A Shameful Act: The Armenian Genocide and the Question of Turkish Responsibility (Metropolitan Books, 2006). Professor Akçam was one of the first academics to openly discuss the Armenian genocide by the Turkish Ottoman government in 1915. He is currently Visiting Associate Professor of History at the University of Minnesota."