Mehmet Polatel is the academy coordinator for the Minority Rights Academy at the Hrant Dink Foundation based in Istanbul. He received his Ph.D. degree from Bogazici University in Istanbul with his dissertation on the emergence and transformation of the Armenian land question in the late Ottoman Empire. Prior to receiving his Ph.D., he earned a BS in International Relations from the Middle East Technical University in 2007, and an MA in Comparative Studies in History and Society from Koç University, Istanbul in 2009. After receiving his Ph.D., he was awarded a postdoctoral fellowship in Armenian Studies from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He was a junior postdoctoral fellow at the USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research in 2019-2020. His main research interests are state-society relations, minority rights, property politics, cultural heritage, the Armenian Genocide, and the 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 Hamidian massacres, land question, and the Armenian Genocide. His new manuscript, Armenians and Land Disputes in the Ottoman Empire, 1850-1914, was published with the Edinburgh University Press in February 2025.