My father, Clement Dodd, who has died aged 93, was a political scientist and academic, an expert in modern Turkish politics and democracy. He was deeply interested in the relationship between Turkey and Cyprus, and became one of the most respected commentators on Cypriot affairs in the UK.

Born in Chester, the son of well-to-do farmers and family butchers, Margaret May (nee Harris) and Arthur Dodd, he won a scholarship to the King’s School, Chester. He went on to the School of Oriental and African Studies (Soas) in London aged 17 to study Turkish and Persian, his interest in the Middle East inspired by a history teacher at school.

After just a year, in January 1945, he was called up and served in British military intelligence in Singapore and Java, where he narrowly avoided being shot at point-blank range when out on patrol: the gun trained on him by a young freedom fighter failed to fire.

He had met his future wife, Nesta Jones, the daughter of a Welsh farming family, during his initial military training in Anglesey, and they were married in 1951.

On leaving the army in 1948, he studied at Edinburgh and Bangor universities, completing two honours degrees, one in Turkish and Persian and another in history and political theory.

Clement lectured in politics at Leeds, Durham and Manchester universities before becoming professor of politics at Hull University at the age of 44. The department he inherited in the early 1970s was in chaos in an era of student activism. Over time Clement restored academic discipline (so much so that the department was often referred to as “the Clemlin” in the student newspaper), and by the time he moved on from Hull in 1986 the department was considered to be one of the best politics schools in Britain.

Forced to retire from his professorship at Hull at the age of 60 as a result of Margaret Thatcher’s changes to higher education, Clement was not ready to quit academic life so early. Securing funding from Shell and from Turkish sources, he set up a postgraduate programme in modern Turkish studies at Soas.

Clement had become increasingly interested in Cyprus, partly inspired by a sense that the Turkish Cypriots had had a rough deal at the hands of the United Nations. He wrote several books and other publications on the Cyprus question, some published through his own company, the Eothen Press. His last book, The History and Politics of the Cyprus Conflict, was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2010.

For many years he wrote a half-yearly update on Cyprus affairs for the Bulletin of the British Association for Turkish Area Studies.

Nesta died in 2017. Clement is survived by his three children, Rosemary, Nigel and me, eight grandchildren and a great-grandchild.