[1] According to Israeli historian Yair Auron, Justin McCarthy with Heath Lowry, Bernard Lewis's successor in Princeton, leads the list of Armenian genocide deniers.
[2] Lowry spent two years (1964–1966) working as a Peace Corps volunteer in a remote mountain village Bereketli, Balıkesir Province in western Turkey before graduating from Portland State University (1966).
[3] In the late '60s, he worked with scholars Speros Vryonis Jr., Andreas Tietze, Gustave von Grunebaum, and Stanford J. Shaw at the University of California Los Angeles, where he received both his master's degree (1970) and Ph.D.
During this time, he began to study contemporary Turkish politics, and taught from 1989 to 1994 at the U.S. State Department's National Foreign Affairs Training Center in Arlington, Virginia, where his students were U.S. diplomats scheduled for assignment in Turkey.
[7] In a 44-page long article published in the Journal of Ottoman Studies in 1986 (initially presented as a paper at a conference at MESA), Lowry wrote a review against historian Richard G. Hovannisian for his depiction of a junior American intelligence officer in his second volume on the history of the First Republic of Armenia.
Lowry took issue with the favorable reviews of the book by other historians such as Firuz Kazemzadeh and Roderic Davison and charged Hovannisian with distorting facts and displaying partiality in his work.
[19] In 1990, psychologist Robert Jay Lifton received a letter from the Turkish Ambassador to the United States, Nüzhet Kandemir,[20] questioning his inclusion of references to the Armenian genocide in one of his books.
The signatories of the document included Alfred Kazin, Norman Mailer, Arthur Miller, Joyce Carol Oates, Susan Sontag, William Styron, David Riesman and John Updike.
[4] The following year, Princeton University was publicly accused of accepting bribes to cater to Turkish propaganda, and multiple scholars protested Lowry's appointment to chair of the department.
Peter Balakian, a professor at Colgate University, described Lowry's work as "evil euphemistic evasion," and organized a protest of 200 Armenian-Americans at the Princeton Club in New York City.