Background

I have a background in Art History, Archaeology and Museum Studies, with experience of working in museums in the UK and on archaeological excavations in Turkey and the Middle East. I am a Research Associate on two projects.

For the EU-funded project Critical Heritages (CoHERE): performing and representing identities in Europe project I conduct research for Work Package 1: Productions and omissions of European heritage. This involves interrogating different meanings of heritage, historical constructions and representations of Europe, formative histories for European identities that are neglected or hidden because of political circumstances, and non-official heritage.

For the Katip Çelebi Newton Fund project Plural Heritages of Istanbul's World Heritage Sites: the case of Land Walls I work with investigators Prof Chris Whitehead and Dr Tom Schofield and am particularly involved in research design, walking ethnographies and community co-production.

After an MPhil on Ottoman art at Mimar Sinan University in Istanbul and an MA in Museum Studies at Newcastle University, I obtained my PhD at the CARMAH at Humboldt University in Berlin, under the supervision of Professor Sharon Macdonald, with a thesis on Turkish historical museums and memory cultures. I am currently transforming this into a monograph - Museums, Memory and Emotion: the politics of the past in Turkey - which will be published by Routledge in 2019 in the Critical Heritages of Europe book series.

Also in 2019 I will be taking up a 3-year Leverhulme Fellowship at Newcastle, with a project entitled 'Living with a Hostile History: Greek-Istanbulite Memory Cultures'.

Research

Alongside my work for funded research projects, I study the politics of history in modern-day Turkey, particularly in relation to the Atatürk and War of Independence Museum in Ankara and the Panorama 1453 Museum in Istanbul. I have also worked on memory acts in the Gezi Protests of 2013 and the representation of Turkish identities in European museums.

I work with approaches and ideas from museum, heritage and memory studies, visual culture, political science and anthropology. My work on Turkish museums focuses in particular on issues of social division and affect and emotion in relation to memory culture.

In 2019 I will commence a 3-year Leverhulme Fellowship at Newcastle, with a project entitled 'Living with a Hostile History: Greek-Istanbulite Memory Cultures. I will investigate how Greek-Istanbulite communities in Istanbul and Athens negotiate collective memory in relation to official histories and circumstances of duress and displacement. 

Teaching

I am not currently engaged in teaching duties because of research project commitments.

Publications