Dr. Hakan Kırımlı was born in Balıkesir / Turkey on 30 November 1958. He earned his BA (Economics) and MA (History) degrees at Hacettepe University/Ankara between 1976 and 1985. He began his doctoral studies at the Ukrainian Free University in Munich, West Germany, and later continued at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Kırımlı graduated from the Department of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1990, earning a Ph.D. in History. Since 1991, he has been employed by the Department of International Relations at Bilkent University/Ankara. He was a visiting scholar at Harvard University (2000) and Stanford University (2016). His primary research interests are the history of Turkic and Muslim peoples of the Russian Empire, with a particular emphasis on the Crimean Tatars, as well as Turko-Russian and Turko-Ukrainian relations. In addition to his native Crimean Tatar and Turkish (Ottoman and contemporary), Dr. Kırımlı speaks and reads English, Russian, German, Volga Tatar, Kazak, Nogay, Uzbek, and reads Ukrainian and Bulgarian. Among other honors, he was awarded the “Cross of Ivan Mazepa” by the President of Ukraine in 2023 and the Halil İnalcık Special Award by the Turkish Academy of Sciences in the Field of History.
Dr. Kırımlı has published numerous articles and books, which include, National Movements and National Identity Among the Crimean Tatars (1905-1916) (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1996), Türkiye’deki Kırım Tatar ve Nogay Köy Yerleşimleri [The Crimean Tatar and Nogay Village Settlements in Turkey] (Istanbul, 2012), Kırım’daki Kırım Tatar (Türk-İslâm) Mimarî Yadigârları [Crimean Tatar (Turko-Islamic) Architectural Monuments in the Crimea] (Ankara, 2016), Geraylar ve Osmanlılar [The Gerays and Ottomans] (Istanbul, 2022) and several articles in Cahiers du Monde Russe et Soviétique (Paris), Middle Eastern Studies (London), Der Islam (Hamburg), Central Asian Survey (London), Voprosy Istorii (Moscow), Belleten (Ankara), and others.