Biography
Kaya Colakoglu is a PhD student in History at the University of Chicago, studying law and capitalism in the 20th century. His current research interrogates global debates surrounding sovereign debt in the 1970s and 1980s, and places them in a lineage of 20th-century attempts to think law’s relationship to the social whole: its separation from or likeness to management, for instance. He argues that conflict between creditor and debtor states centered on competing visions of this relationship.
Kaya received his B.A. in History from Dartmouth College in 2024. His honors thesis on the Cold War and Turkish developmentalism, Time, Structure and the State in the Turkish Years of Lead (1950-1980), was awarded the Rintels Prize for the Best Thesis in the Social Sciences.
