Professor Richard Nornton (center) introduces Suzanne Campagna to Professor Emeritus Herbert Mason. Photo by Fred Sway

“Father was always interested in education and politics,” recalls Campagna. “He was very much involved in politics and was very active from way back in the movement for a change in [Turkish] government. Even now, when I think of him, I see him in my mind talking about politics.”

An ardent member of the Young Turks nationalist reform party, Kerven was temporarily imprisoned for his beliefs. After the Young Turks led a rebellion against Sultan Abdul Hamid II, who was officially deposed and exiled in 1909, Kerven was reinstated in the army and his arrest was expunged from his record. He fought in the Balkans War, taught, and in the late 1920s was elected to the Turkish parliament, where he served until his retirement late in the 1940s.

While the lectureship in Kerven’s name does not focus solely on politics, educating people about Turkish government is one of its goals.

The lecture program, now in its tenth year, also honors Campagna’s late husband, Gerard Campagna (GRS’52), who earned his doctorate in history at Boston University. Suzanne Campagna remembers his passion for education and his love of fine books. He earned a master’s degree in French in 1937 from Columbia University and studied in France. Serving in the military during and just after World War II, he met his soon-to-be wife at a dinner party in Paris held by a Turkish diplomat. “We kept in contact,” she says. “I learned he was very interested in French literature and was quite scholarly.”

The couple married in Paris in 1945 and moved to the United States in 1946, when he began teaching at the University of Massachusetts at Fort Devens. It was then she began thinking about educating the public about her homeland.

“I was very surprised at the lack of knowledge about Turkey” in America, she says, except among scholars. “That was the seed for this lectureship.”

Topics of the lectures, usually held in April, include Turkish society, culture, and politics; the only restriction is that the primary emphasis must be on modern Turkey and the lecturers not be government officials.

“The lecture series is a great success,” says BU anthropology and international relations professor Richard Norton, first chairman of the committee that chooses lecturers for the program. “We have had leading scholars and journalists, roughly split 50-50 between men and women. It usually attracts a nice crowd of 100 or so, including many Boston University students.”

Campagna recently made a bequest to the University that will permanently endow the lectureship and a fellowship for a doctoral student studying modern Turkey, Turkish culture, society, politics, or economics. The fellowship also honors her father and husband, each of whom wrote a thesis about Turkish government in his own time: Kerven’s thesis is on the Young Turks; Gerard Campagna’s is on the Turkish Republic.

“I felt there was a certain lack of understanding about that part of the world,” says Campagna. “This bequest is for education.”

—Danielle Masterson