Ulus Baker

Who was Ulus Baker?

Ulus Sedat Baker was a Turkish Cypriot sociologist. Baker was born to a cosmopolitan family; his mother was the famous Cypriot poet Pembe Marmara, and his father was the prominent psychiatrist of the island, Sedat Baker. Baker studied in Russia, Turkey, France, and Cyprus. He completed his studies at the Department of Sociology in METU in Ankara and began his academic life in the same institution shortly thereafter. He was a very productive intellectual and a prolific scholar; he had already become an influential public intellectual in Turkish cultural life beyond the academia by mid-nineties. Although he had always taught within academic institutions, his relation with academia had certain tensions and breaks; he only completed his Ph.D. in 2002 with a thesis titled "From Opinions to Images: Towards a Sociology of Affects", he was disinterested in having a stable academic position, and after 2000 till his death, he had various teaching gigs in different universities in Ankara and Istanbul besides his main affiliation at Middle East Technical University. Shortly before his death, he also started teaching in Istanbul, where he died.