I am a Leverhulme Research Fellow and I work across heritage, memory and museum studies on the project 'Living with a Hostile History: Greek-Istanbuli Memory Cultures'. This involves working with minority Greek-Istanbuli groups in Istanbul and Athens to develop online 'memory maps'. The project is about saving community memories at risk, giving voice, and increasing awareness and visibility of hidden or silenced memories that are rarely recognised in official heritage. My work links anthropological heritage and memory research with digital practice and filmmaking.
After an MPhil on Ottoman art at Mimar Sinan University in Istanbul and an MA in Museum Studies at Newcastle University, I worked in museums in the UK and on archaeological excavations in the Middle East. I then returned to study with a Ph.D. at CARMAH at Humboldt University in Berlin, under the supervision of Professor Sharon Macdonald, with a thesis on Turkish historical museums and memory cultures. This turned into my book Museums, Emotion and Memory Culture: the politics of the past in Turkey. I am currently working on a new book Worlds of Memory and Sensory Heritage: Living with the Past in the Greek Communities of Istanbul, under contract with Routledge.
I have also been Research Associate on the EU-funded project Critical Heritages (CoHERE): performing and representing identities in Europe project and the Katip Çelebi Newton Fund project Plural Heritages of Istanbul's World Heritage Sites: the case of Land Walls.
My research ranges across:
- the politics of history and public memory in modern-day Turkey
- community engagement in heritage and memory practice (especially minority and marginalised communities)
- ethnographic methods for working with people and communities
- heritage, memory, museums and emotion
- heritage and documentary filmmaking
- heritage, memory and sensory and creative ethnographies
- digital memory mapping
- European heritages
I teach on heritage and communities and qualitative methodologies.
- Bozoğlu G. Museums, Emotion, and Memory Culture: The Politics of the Past in Turkey. London, UK: Routledge, 2020.
- Whitehead C, Bozoğlu G. Protest, Bodies, and the Grounds of Memory: Taksim Square as 'heritage site' and the 2013 Gezi Protests. Heritage and Society 2016, 9(2), 111-136.
- Bozoglu G, Whitehead C. Turkish Neo-Ottoman memory culture and the problems of copying the past. In: Brita Brenna, Hans Dam Christensen, Olav Hamran, ed. Museums as Cultures of Copies: The Crafting of Artefacts and Authenticity. Oxon: Routledge, 2018.
- Whitehead C, Bozoglu G. Constitutive Others and the Management of Difference: Museum Representations of Turkish Identities. In: Whitehead, C; Lloyd, K; Eckersley, S; Mason, R, ed. Museums, Migration and Identity in Europe. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2015, pp.253-284.
- Bozoğlu G. ‘A great bliss to keep the sensation of conquest alive!’: The emotional politics of the Panorama 1453 Museum in Istanbul. In: De Cesari, C.; Kaya, A, ed. European Memory in Populism: Representations of Self and Other. Abingdon: Routledge, 2020, pp.91-111.
- Whitehead C, Bozoglu G. Heritage and Memory in Europe: a review of key concepts and frameworks. CoHERE Critical Archive 2017, 1-23.
- Schofield T, Foster-Smith D, Bozoglu G, Whitehead C. Co-Producing Collections: Re-imagining a Polyvocal Past with Cultural Probes. Open Library of Humanities 2018, 4(1), 35-35.
- Whitehead C, Eckersley S, Daugbjerg M, Bozoğlu G, ed. Dimensions of Heritage and Memory: Multiple Europes and the Politics of Crisis. Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2020.
- Whitehead C, Eckersley S, Bozoglu G. Negotiating Instrumental and Realist perspectives in European Heritage Research. Economia della Cultura 2018, XXVIII(4), 551-566.
- Schofield T, Foster-Smith D, Bozoğlu G, Whitehead C. Design and Plural Heritages: Composing Critical Futures. In: ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. 2019, Glasgow, UK: ACM.