Stanford J. Shaw was born in the St. Paul Hospital, St. Paul, Minnesota at 2:15 a.m. on the morning of May 5, 1930. His parents were Belle and Albert, who had immigrated to St. Paul from England and Russia respectively in the early years of the twentieth century. Stanford Shaw and his parents moved to Los Angeles, California in 1933 because of his father's illness, and they lived there until 1939, first in Hollywood, where Stanford went to Kindergarden, and then in Ocean Park, a community on the shore of the Pacific Ocean between Santa Monica and Venice, where his parents operated a photographic shop on the Ocean Park pier. The family went back to St. Paul in 1939, where Stanford went to the Webster Elementary School. After his parents were divorced. Stanford went with his mother to Akron, Ohio during World War II, where he went to elementary school, though he hated the city since it was filled with red neck southerners who came to work in the rubber factories during the war. Stanford and his mother remained there until she married Irving Jaffey and moved back to St. Paul. Stanford then attended Mechanic Arts High School in St. Paul, where he graduated in 1947, one out of only five students from a student body of 500 who went to college. He went on to Stanford University, where he majored in British History under the direction of Professor Carl Brand, with a minor in Near Eastern History, under the direction of Professor Wayne Vucinich. He received his B.A.at Stanford in 1951 and M.A. in 1952, with a thesis on the Foreign Policy of the British Labour Party from 1920 until 1938, based on research in the Hoover Institution at Stanford. He then studied Middle Eastern history along with Arabic, Turkish and Persian as a Graduate Student at Princeton University starting in 1952, receiving his M.A. in 1955. Subsequently he went to England to study with Bernard Lewis and Paul Wittek at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London and with Professor Hamilton A.R. Gibb at Oxford University. Following this, he went to Egypt to study with Shafiq Ghorbal and Adolph Grohmann at the University of Cairo and Shaikh Sayyid at the Azhar University, also doing research in the Ottoman archives of Egypt at the Citadel in Cairo for his Princeton Ph.D. dissertation concerning Ottoman rule in Egypt. Before leaving Egypt, he had a personal interview with President Gamal Abd al-Nasser, who arranged for him to take his microfilms of Ottoman documents out of the country. In 1956-7 he studied at the University of Istanbul with Professors Omer Lutfi Barkan, Mukrimin Halil Yinanc, Halil Sahillioglu, and Zeki Velidi Togan, also completing research on his dissertation in the Ottoman archives of Istanbul, where he was helped by a number of staff members, including Ziya Esrefoglu, Turgut Isiksal, Rauf Tuncay, and Attila Cetin, and in the Topkapi Sarayi archives, where he was provided with valuable assistance and support by its Director, Hayrullah Ors and studied with Professor Ismail Hakki Uzuncarsili. He received his Ph.D. degree in 1958 from Princeton University with a dissertation entitled The Financial and Administrative Organization and Development of Ottoman Egypt, 1517-1798, prepared under the direction of Professor Lewis Thomas and Professor Hamilton A.R. Gibb, which was published by the Princeton University Press in 1962. Stanford Shaw served as Assistant and Associate Professor of Turkish Language and History, with tenure, in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and in the Department of History at Harvard University from 1958 until 1968, and as Professor of Turkish history at the University of California Los Angeles from 1968 until his retirement in 1992. Afterwards he was recalled to teach Turkish history at U.C.L.A. between 1992 and 1997 before going to Bilkent University as Professor of Ottoman and Turkish History starting in 1999. Stanford Shaw was founder and first editor of the International Journal of Middle East Studies, published by the Cambridge University Press for the Middle East Studies Association, from 1970 until 1980. He is the author of numerous books and articles, including (with his wife Ezel Kural Shaw )History of the Ottoman Empire and Modern Turkey (2 volumes, Cambridge University Press 1976-1977), Between Old and New: The Ottoman Empire under Sultan Selim III (Harvard University Press), The Budget of Ottoman Egypt (Mouton and Co. The Hague), Ottoman Egypt in the Age of the French Revolution (Harvard University Press), Ottoman Egypt in the Eighteenth Century (Harvard University Press), The Jews of the Ottoman Empire and the Turkish Republic (Macmillan, London, and New York University Press, 1991), Turkey and the Holocaust (Macmillan, London and New York University Press, 1992), and The Turkish War of National Liberation, 1918-1923, to be published by the Turkish Historical Society in 3 volumes in 1999. He is an honorary member of the Turkish Historical Society (Ankara), recipient of honorary degrees from Harvard University and the Bogazici University (Istanbul), and a member of the Middle East Studies Association, the American Historical Society, and the Tarih Vakfi (Istanbul). He also has received a Medal of Honor (Liyakat Madalyasi) from the President of Turkey and medals for lifetime achievement from the Turkish-American Association and from the Research Centre for Islamic History, Art and Culture (IRCICA) at the Yildiz Palace, Istanbul. He has received two major research awards from the United States National Endowment from the Humanities as well as fellowships from the Ford Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Fulbright-Hayes Committee. Professor Shaw is presently doing research for monographs which will deal with the Ottoman home front during the Great War of 1910-1923, and the Turkish home front during World War II. A collection of his articles is also in the process of being published by the Isis Press of Istanbul.