Mehmet Polatel is the academy coordinator for the Minority Rights Academy Project at the Hrant Dink Foundation based in Istanbul. He received his Ph.D. degree from Bogazici University in Istanbul and he won the Distinguished Dissertation Award of the Society for Armenian Studies. Prior to receiving his Ph.D., he earned an MA in Comparative Studies in History and Society from Koç University, Istanbul. After receiving his Ph.D., he was awarded a postdoctoral fellowship in Armenian Studies from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor and a junior postdoctoral fellowship from the USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research. His main research interests include state-society relations, minority rights, property politics, cultural heritage, Armenian Genocide, and dispossession of Armenians. He co-authored a book with Uğur Ü. Üngör entitled Confiscation and Destruction: Young Turk Seizure of Armenian Properties (Bloomsbury, 2011) and published several articles and book chapters on the massacres of 1894-7, land question, and the Armenian Genocide.