The purpose of this symposium is to examine within a scholarly forum the history, language, literature, and culture of the Turkish element in the United States of America. This includes coverage of the immigrants from the Ottoman Empire and their descendants, as well as of immigrants self-defined as Turkish from other regions of the world. It is hoped that this will lead eventually to a separate Turkish-American Studies discipline, which will moreover collect under its umbrella scholarship on Turkish-American topics done within various other contexts.