These are the proceedings of a conference held in May 2006 in the framework of the Center’s Suleyman Demirel Program for Contemporary Turkish Studies. Bringing together a select group of scholars mainly from Turkey, but also from the United States and Israel, the conference dealt with cultural developments in the Turkish Republic with special reference to literature, the media and popular culture, music and the cinema. A recurring theme in all the presentations was the remarkably striking interrelationship between culture and politics, whether in regard to the efforts of the Kemalist Republic to shape a new modern Turkish culture, detached from its Ottoman heritage, or the impact of domestic political liberalization after the Second World War on all forms of cultural expression, from literature to the cinema and from television to Pop music.