Berkay Kaan Kabadayı

Berkay Kaan Kabadayı is an M.A. student in American History at Bilkent University, working under the supervision of Prof. Ken Weisbrode. He received his B.A. training in American Studies at Hacettepe University before moving more fully toward historical research.

His research interests range across American history, the history of capitalism, the history of science and technology, intellectual history, historical sociology, and the history of modernity and modernism. Rather than treating these as separate fields, he is interested in the larger historical processes that connect economic systems, political institutions, technologies, forms of expertise, and ways of understanding the world.

One strand of his work concerns the changing place of the United States in the world. He is interested in how American power, institutions, ideas, technologies, and forms of expertise have interacted with other societies, particularly Turkey and the wider region. His approach does not treat American influence as a simple one-way process. He is more interested in circulation, adaptation, negotiation, institutional networks, and the ways ideas and practices change as they move between different political and social settings.

His broader intellectual interests are strongly informed by historical sociology and by approaches to history that move between individual events and larger structures. In this sense, he is particularly interested in questions associated with historians such as Fernand Braudel: different scales of historical time, the longue durée, the relationship between material structures and human action, and the possibility of understanding political or intellectual events as parts of much longer economic, institutional, technological, and social transformations.

The history of capitalism forms another part of this agenda. He is interested in capitalism not simply as an economic system, but as a historical formation that has reshaped institutions, political authority, technology, knowledge, everyday life, and conceptions of human behavior. This interest also extends to political economy and to the historical relationship between state capacity, expertise, institutional organization, and economic change.

Technology occupies a similar place in his work. He is interested in how technologies alter institutions and social relations, how societies imagine technological change, and how technological systems acquire political and intellectual authority. Artificial intelligence has become one part of this broader interest. His work on AI examines it not only as a contemporary technology but also as a problem in the history and sociology of knowledge: a system that raises questions about expertise, autonomy, human judgment, institutional power, and the changing relationship between people and machines.

These interests are reflected in his existing research. His published and ongoing work has addressed artificial intelligence and alienation, Enlightenment ideals and early American museums, institutional capacity and political economy, and the relationship between psychological warfare and behavioral science in Cold War Turkey and the United States. He has also worked extensively with archival and bureaucratic sources and is interested in how cataloguing systems, administrative language, metadata, selection practices, and archival absences shape what historians are able to know about the past.

Underlying these different projects is a broader question: how do large systems shape historical possibility? Whether the subject is capitalism, the state, science, technology, American power, or artificial intelligence, his work is concerned with the interaction between structures and human agency, and with how institutions produce, organize, and legitimize particular forms of knowledge.

At Bilkent, he plans to develop these interests through graduate work in American history while continuing to work across history of science, historical sociology, political economy, and the history of technology.