Ms. Eren is a PhD candidate in the Department of Archaeology at Boston University. Her primary interest is building practices in the Late Bronze and Iron Ages of Anatolia. A part of her dissertation project, her research at ANAMED focuses on the investigation of the relationships between state power and monumental construction. She explores how power relations at Sardis, the capital of a territorially growing Lydian state (western Türkiye, 8th to 6th centuries BCE) during the Iron Age, were established through monumental construction, concentrating in particular on types of investment in public architecture, processes of organization, and symbolic meanings. The project examines whether scalar changes observed in architecture during Lydia’s political growth are reflected in other aspects of monumental construction, such as organization of natural resources and labor, spatial forms, and aesthetics. This project not only places Lydian monumentality into the context of Iron Age politics and cultures, but also approaches monumental building practice as a sociopolitical phenomenon.

Mr. Liew is a PhD candidate in History and Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard University. This project forms part of his dissertation research on Sunni Muslim political discourses on the caliphate from the eleventh to thirteenth century. This turbulent period witnessed the rise of the Seljuq Turks as a dominant military force in the Middle East and also a revival of caliphal authority in Baghdad and its surrounding regions after a two-century long decline. In light of these developments, his dissertation examines how Muslim religious scholars wrote about the caliphate across different genres of writing in the Islamic scholastic tradition.

Throughout his career as a prominent Sufi master in Baghdad, Abū Ḥafṣ ʿUmar al-Suhrawardī served as the Abbasid caliph’s ambassador and public preacher on numerous occasions. Given his prominent role in the caliph’s network of intellectuals, Liew examines how Suhrawardī wrote about the caliphate in his writings and how he conceived of politics and government in an Islamic context. This project aims for a more nuanced understanding of how Sufism and Abbasid imperial politics interacted in the medieval Islamic period and will show how the Sunni caliphate discourse operated within the discursive context of Sufism.

Mr. Lin is a PhD candidate at the Centre for Byzantine, Ottoman and Modern Greek Studies at the University of Birmingham. His research focuses on the geographical and institutional dynamics influencing merchant activities in Cilicia in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. With portolan charts and travelers' accounts, he reviews the different prominent locations for trade through these two centuries. This research challenges the presumed prominence of Ayas in the kingdom, based on the changing prominence of trade locations. By analyzing the trade privileges obtained by the Genoese and the Venetians, he establishes distinct institutional dynamics in these two series of trade privileges and their impact on the respective merchant group’s activities in the kingdom. In the course of his fellowship at ANAMED, he aims to present an alternative narrative of medieval Eastern Mediterranean trade that has long been dominated by the rise and fall of Acre and Famagusta.

Mr. Maric is a PhD candidate in the Classics Department at the University of Edinburgh. In his doctoral thesis “Imperial Ideology after Iconoclasm: Negotiating the Limits of Imperial Power in Byzantium, 843–913” he is focusing on the negotiations of a new balance of power between church and state and the lasting effects of the iconoclast controversy within this process. Since the ideological struggle manifested in various contexts, and was transmitted via diverse media, the thesis draws on an extensive body of both written and visual material and the discourse analysis is employed as the overarching methodology which enables a holistic approach. The characteristics of iconography are highly significant for constructing the image of power and dialogue between the emperor and his subjects, both his associates and political foes, in order to define ideology; Maric’s project at ANAMED pertains to this aspect of the thesis; namely, he will be exploring how the emerging post-iconoclast image program relates to the political discourse concerning the limits of the two powers. Given the paramount presence of the Hagia Sophia in the life of the Byzantine capital – dominating the visual and ideological landscape of the city and its inhabitants – and its position as a venue for the emperor-patriarch interplay, study of the image-program executed within the Great church in the outlined period is at the heart of his project.

Ms. Morita is a PhD candidate at the University of Tokyo. Her dissertation examines the social and administrative functions of neighborhoods (mahalles) in eighteenth-century Istanbul, focusing on the time of Mahmud I (1730–54) when public disorder following the revolts became a great menace to his own regime. She explores the dynamic structure of the neighborhoods per se, where the “peace of the community” was negotiated through various relationships that determined the maintenance or the breakdown of public order. Based on empirical analyses, mainly of the court records of Istanbul, and in combination with referral to other Ottoman archives and chronicles, as well as accounts of the British and French ambassadors, she discusses how the neighborhoods played a central role in urban administration and how the government substantially relied on them regarding this issue, which was a reflection of the relations between the state and its subjects during this period. Her project seeks to be a contribution not only in that it elaborates on what the neighborhoods of the Ottoman capital were like, but also in that it locates the consolidation of these neighborhood communities as units of population control in a wider timespan of the political and social transitions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Mr. Okan is a PhD candidate in the History Department at Columbia University. His dissertation research explores the establishment of Republican Türkiye and the League of Nations Mandates in present-day Syria, Lebanon, and Iraq following the fall of the Ottoman Empire. He seeks to develop a comparative inquiry into how elite and non-elite sectors of late Ottoman society coped with transitions to these post-Ottoman regimes in the decade between 1918 and 1928. Prior to beginning his doctoral studies, he studied at Uppsala University, the American University of Beirut, Cairo University, and Yale University in conjunction with his undergraduate and graduate studies at Boğaziçi University.

Ms. Özel is a PhD candidate in the History and Middle Eastern Studies program at Harvard University. Her research interests comprise Ottoman maritime history, economic history of the Mediterranean in the 16th and 17th centuries, history of Ottoman cartography, and history of capitalism. Her ANAMED project as part of her dissertation research explores the economic costs and benefits of piracy, and how pirate activities steered political and commercial relations in the Mediterranean. She focuses on the quantitative features of piracy, integrating applications of digital humanities in her methods of historical research.

Ms. Picht is an associated PhD candidate in the research training group “Value and Equivalence” at the Goethe-University Frankfurt, Germany. Since her Masters thesis the focus of her research is in the field of ceramics, especially those of Hellenistic times. Her long-term participation in the excavations of Priene roused her interest in Asia Minor. As is widely known, Hellenism is an epoch of profound political and cultural changes and innovations. Since pottery is one of the best preserved remains, it is one of the most important sources for our understanding of complex Hellenistic society. Her PhD project aims on describing as well as analyzing peculiarities in the pottery spectrum of the cities in Asia Minor. Therefore, she selected Pergamon, Ephesos, Knidos, and Priene as case studies to describe local trends. Additionally, Athens will also be included as a counterpart on the Greek mainland. The detailed description of the pottery of each city will be juxtaposed by the investigation of other materials like literary as well as epigraphical sources, depictions and other archaeological finds, like lamps, to develop a model that can explain the formation of the different ceramic regions.

Ms. Sewing is a PhD candidate at Heidelberg University. The starting point of her PhD project is the analysis of a huge ecclesiastical building complex on the Aegean coast near Ephesus. The peculiar layout of the complex, its decoration, and associated finds point to an interpretation as an important pilgrim church. Her first aim at ANAMED is a comprehensive study of the building complex based on the methods of both archaeology and historical building research. Because of the good state of preservation of the building, this will enhance our knowledge of construction techniques and the layout of Late Antique churches and of pilgrim centers in Asia Minor. A further goal is the interpretation of the site itself: the church has to be put in its topographical as well as its historical context. She will also examine the development of the pilgrim church, its connection to the city and its relation to the other, well-known pilgrimage sites of Ephesus. The results will enhance our knowledge of the sacred topography of Christian Ephesus. Answering all these questions will be an important progress not only for this specific project but also for a closer understanding of Late Antique and Byzantine Asia Minor in general.

Mr. Yerlioğlu is a PhD candidate History and Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard University, having earlier received his B.A. in Psychology in 2007, his M.A. in Clinical Psychology in 2010, and having worked as a psychotherapist. He is interested mainly in the fields of history of medicine and the social history of healing practices in the early modern period. In his research at ANAMED, he is working on the Ottoman medical discourse of the mid-seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, especially the novel ideas that were generally put under the umbrella term tibb-ı cedid (“new medicine”). He follows a comprehensive approach analyzing the medical texts of early modern Ottoman physicians and the interactions between the state and the physicians in the medical marketplace.

Dr. Alarashi is an associate researcher at Archéorient. Her research focuses on the evolution of the symbolic systems of prehistoric human groups through the study of their body ornaments. It explores technological innovations, modalities of procurement of mineral and aquatic resources used for symbolic purposes, and investigates human mobility through circulation networks of “prestige” items and technological skills. Her fieldwork is based in Anatolia, the Levant, and other regions of the Old World. Dr. Alarashi’s ANAMED project investigates body ornaments as physical supports of the socio-cultural identities of prehistoric Anatolian communities and as reliable means to explore symbolic expressions at both individual and collective levels. Building on prior research focused on the Levant, this project broadens her investigation in geographic and chronological terms by analyzing a series of Neolithic and Chalcolithic adornments from Nevalı Çori, Aşıklı Höyük, Tepecik Çiftlik, and Güvercinkayası through multiple methodological approaches. Moreover, innovations in bead technology, in particular pyrotechnic processing, are investigated through diachronic studies. Cultural interactions and the involvement of Anatolian societies in the spread of Neolithic from East to West are questioned through in-depth comparisons with ornamental traditions in the Levant and Europe.

Dr. Autret started to work on amphorae produced in Cilicia (SW Türkiye) during her MA studies (Rennes 2 Haute Bretagne University, France). She continued research on this Anatolian province during her PhD (joint supervision, Paris-Sorbonne University and University of Cyprus). She focused on agriculture, amphora production, and commercial relationships Cilicia maintained with other Mediterranean regions during the Roman period. Through analysis of archaeological data and ancient sources, especially textual and numismatic evidence, she demonstrated that Cilicia experienced unprecedented agricultural growth toward the end of the 1st c. B.C., when it became a Roman province. For her work at ANAMED, she intends to extend the study of local production and commercial exchange in Cilicia to the Hellenistic period for publication with data from her dissertation. Although in this area no kiln-site dated to the Hellenistic Era is known, amphora production is attested through coinage and amphora stamps. The aim of her research is not only to determine the scale of agricultural production and distribution, but also to investigate trade relationships Cilicia maintained before the Roman period. This is essential in order to analyze the impact of Roman rule in Cilicia.

Dr. Charriere completed his PhD in Comparative Literature at the University of Michigan in 2016. During his stay at ANAMED, he will work on a book project, entitled We Must Ourselves Write About Ourselves: The Trans-communal Emergence of the Novel in the Late Ottoman Empire, 1840–1908, which surveys the development of prose fiction in the late Ottoman period within a comparative framework and includes examples from Ottoman-Turkish, Greek, Armenian, and Ladino literatures. This project aims to overcome the fragmentation of previous monolingual scholarly approaches by presenting a more inclusive narrative highlighting the trans-communal complexity of late-Ottoman novel culture and by contributing new data that sheds light on the literary relations between ethno-linguistic groups in the Empire from the Tanzimat reforms to the Young Turk Revolution of 1908. In an effort to study the trans-communal rise of the novel in the late Ottoman Empire, his project gives equal attention to the texts and their larger cultural contexts, combining the tools and methodologies of literary analysis, historical research, and sociological inquiry. His corpus includes novels written in Ottoman-Turkish, Greek, Armenian, and Ladino and published in the Ottoman Empire between the early 1840s and the beginning of the twentieth century, as well as a large number of translations of Western novels into the aforementioned languages, which he treats as creative works in their own right, to be analyzed as sites of literary and cultural mediation and experimentation.

Dr. Murphy holds a PhD in Archaeology and the Ancient World from Brown University (2014) and an MA in Eastern Mediterranean Archaeology from the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium (2007). Her research interests concern the study of workshops and ancient crafts production, economic practice, technology, and labor. Her fieldwork at the site of Sagalassos (SW Türkiye) has investigated crafts production during the Roman and Late Antique periods of the city through the excavation of workshop buildings, furnaces, and production infrastructure, as well as through the analysis of associated material culture (tools, finished products, raw materials, and production waste). This research is serving to reconstruct daily work practices and the organization of artisanal labor in the city. Her project at ANAMED, “Roman Urban Manufacturing and Trade in Asia Minor: A Comparative Spatial Analysis Evaluating Models of ‘Industrial Quarters’ and ‘Neighborhood Stores’,” investigates the development of urban industry in Asia Minor from the Imperial to Late Antique periods (1st c. BC – 6th c. AD) in order to assess local decision-making in the placement and scale of shops and workshops, as well as patterns in the scale, character, and status of manufacturing and commercial activities across Asia Minor.

Dr. Strupler received his PhD in Archaeology in 2016 jointly from the University of Strasbourg and from the University of Münster. Before coming to ANAMED, he worked at the German Archaeological Institute in Istanbul and was a fellow at the French Institute of Anatolian Studies in Istanbul. His dissertation, “The Lower City of Boğazköy during the Second Millennium BC,” examined the evolution of social patterns of the domestic quarters at the critical moment when the site became the political capital of the Hittites. Dr. Strupler is an Open Science and Free Software advocate and he is enthusiastic about developing theory and methods capable of exploring archaeological data through open and reproducible standards. At ANAMED his project aims to characterize the nature and intensity of human-environment interactions on the Milesian Peninsula (Aydın Province, southwestern Türkiye) from the prehistoric to the Ottoman era (ca. 5th millennium BC–2nd millennium AD). This work is mainly based on results of the Panormos Project led by Dr. Slawisch and Dr. T.C. Wilkinson.

Dr. Votruba is a marine archaeologist who recently received his PhD from the University of Oxford. He focuses on maritime trade, human interaction with the sea, and landscapes of pre-industrial maritime cultures (coastal settlements, harbors, coastal geomorphology, and ancient maritime economy generally). He has excavated at the sites of Caesarea Maritima’s Sebastos Harbor (Israel), and an Archaic and Classical harbor of Liman Tepe/Klazomenai (Türkiye). For his doctoral research he investigated ancient mooring practice and the development of iron anchors. This work includes the foundations of a corpus of published ancient anchor finds (until ca. 1500 CE), and incorporates an experimentation project based on full-scale anchor reconstructions of all types, completed in cooperation with Osman Erkurt of the 360° Research Group. For his ANAMED fellowship research, Dr. Votruba is investigating iron anchor design in the seas surrounding the Anatolian Peninsula during the Byzantine through Renaissance Periods. This is a region and time of great social and technological change, and this may be reflected in the designs of iron anchors. Alongside other distinctive features, the general form changes from a ‘T’ like cruciform shape through a ‘Y’ and, finally, the design commonly known. Various theories for these forms include diversifying long-distance connections and their influences, ship size and design changes, technological iron working limitations in tandem with revolutionary advancements, and even possible association with sacred symbolism.

Dr. Fales’ field of work is the history and philology of the Neo-Assyrian period, dealing with both Assyrian and West Semitic sources. His planned 2017 ANAMED research, “The economic relations of the Neo-Assyrian empire with Southern Anatolia (9th - 7th centuries B.C.)” tackles a historical issue which has hitherto received few and vague answers. By putting together the data deriving from the ancient texts dealing with Southern Türkiye, the finds and intimations drawn from archaeological excavations in the areas of the Amuq, Amanus, Cilicia, and inner regions, and historical-economical and historical-geographic considerations, culled from sources as varied as Classical writers and satellite photography, his aim is to sketch a broad-stroked picture of (a) what the Assyrian military conquests stood to gain in terms of pillage and exploitation of the Southern Anatolian region, and (b) what, instead, the latter could, in “softer” terms, provide the Mesopotamian state in terms of mid- to long-range commerce from western and inner Anatolia. Such a two-way (“give-and-take”) pattern of economic interaction has been nowadays ascertained for the economy of the Levantine coastline of Phoenicia and Philistia: might a similar pattern be applicable to Southern Turkish areas in the very same age?

Dr. Hamadeh is an Associate Professor of Art History at Rice University. She is the author of The City’s Pleasures: Istanbul in the Eighteenth Century (Seattle & London: University of Washington Press, 2007), which appeared in Turkish with İletişim Press, in 2010, and is currently coediting Early Modern Istanbul, a Brill Companion Series volume, with Çiğdem Kafescioğlu. She was a professeur invité at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales (Paris, May 2016), the Alfred H. Howell Visiting Chair in History at the American University of Beirut (2010–11) and is the recipient of several grants, including the Getty Research Foundation Grant (2005–06). Her areas of interest are in early modern and modern Ottoman cities and architecture; public culture and public spaces; the urban underworld; and artistic connections in the early modern world. Her ANAMED book project, ``Istanbul, City of Bachelors: an Urban History from Below`` takes as vantage point the figure of the migrant-bachelor (bekâr) to address the urban space and foreground everyday spatial agency in Istanbul’s eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century history. It is a study of bachelors’ spaces, architecture, and social networks, which reflects on questions of governance and daily life, inclusion and exclusion, and politics of urban space.

Dr. Harpster completed his PhD in 2005, has conducted research in northern Cyprus for several years, and was recently awarded a Marie Curie Fellowship to lead the MISAMS (Modeling Inhabited Spaces of the Ancient Mediterranean Sea) Project at the University of Birmingham, England. Using a unique GIS protocol, MISAMS developed and tested the methodology necessary to convert the corpus of maritime archaeological data on the Mediterranean seafloor into centennial models of maritime activity. His project at ANAMED, “Ancient Maritime Dynamics,” updates his models of activity in the Aegean and eastern Mediterranean with additional data, and conducts a unique study that compares the concentrations of Aegean maritime activity to the location and histories of Constantinople, Phocaea, Smyrna, Ephesus, Miletus, Myndos, and Halicarnassus. The primary goal of this Project is to assess what characteristics or influences port cites may have on surrounding patterns of activity. Are ports the loci of activity, or are they situated on gradients between concentrations of activity? Is there a relationship between the size of the port city and its impact on the adjacent maritime movements? Or, are there no relationships at all, and these patterns of activity are instead impacted only by coastal geography?

Dr. Kaçar is a Professor of Ancient History at the History Department in the Faculty of Letters of Istanbul Medeniyet University. He received his PhD from the University of Wales, Swansea (now Swansea University) in 2000, with a thesis on the formation of the early church councils. He taught ancient and early Byzantine history courses in Balıkesir and Pamukkale Universities between 2000–2015. Among his important articles are “The Election of Nectarius of Tarsus: Imperial Ideology, Patronage and Philia” (Studia Patristica, 2010); “Did the great schism begin at the council of Serdica in AD 343?” in Serdica Edict (311 AD): Concepts and Realizations of the Idea of Religious Toleration (Sofya, 2014); and “Church Councils and Their Impact on the Economy of the Cities in Roman Asia Minor,” in Patterns in the Economy of Roman Asia Minor (Swansea & London, 2005). He has translated Peter Brown’s seminal work, The World of Late Antiquity, and Stephen Mitchell’s comprehensive synthesis, A History of the Later Roman Empire (2nd ed.), and has recently edited two books: The Sieges of Constantinople and The Lycus Valley in Late Antiquity (Istanbul 2016). His research focuses on topics concerned with the field of Late Antiquity, with a special interest in the history of early Christianity and the history of European Huns and Romans. His project at ANAMED focuses on the Late Antique history of the Patriarchate of Constantinople.

Dr. Marinov is a historian dealing with modern and contemporary Balkan history. He is a former researcher at the French School at Athens and lecturer at the Universities of Sofia and Plovdiv. Marinov has worked most notably on the history of modern Macedonia, on the construction of cultural heritage, and the political uses of the past in the Balkans. He is the author of The Macedonian Question from 1944 to Nowadays. Communism and Nationalism in the Balkans (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2010) and Our Ancestors the Thracians: Ideological Uses of Antiquity in Southeast Europe (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2016) (both in French). His research project at ANAMED focuses on a series of buildings from the late Ottoman era that could be designated as “Bulgarian monuments” in Türkiye. Marinov is interested in the role these monuments play in transnational politics of heritage, involving a variety of national, local and inter-state actors: Turkish and Bulgarian state institutions, municipalities in Istanbul and elsewhere, community organizations and “civil society,” business entrepreneurs, Church institutions, and EU institutions. His project thus reexamines the history of individual buildings as well as the dynamics, the actors, and the diverse logics of definition and protection of heritage.

Dr. Mountjoy is a Mycenaean and Minoan pottery specialist and has worked on pottery in Greece, Cyprus, Israel, Egypt, and Türkiye with the aid, amongst other awards, of an Alexander von Humboldt Fellowship, and, at the Albright Institute, Jerusalem, the Glassman Holland Fellowship and the Seymour Gitin Distinguished Professorship. She is a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries, London and a Corresponding Member of the German Archaeological Institute. Her books include Mycenaean Decorated Pottery: a Guide to Identification (1986), Mycenaean Pottery: an Introduction (1993), Regional Mycenaean Decorated Pottery (1999), and Knossos: The South House (2003). Her project at ANAMED is the preparation for publication of the 12th century BC Aegean-style pottery from the 1999–2007 excavations of R. Meriç at Bademgediği Tepe, north of Ephesos. The site is identified by Meriç as the Hittite Puranda, a city of Arzawa, which was captured by Mursili II in the late 14th century. The Aegean-style pottery comprises the largest corpus of Aegean-style IIIC pottery found in the west Anatolian coastal region, apart from that of Troy. The shapes and motifs demonstrate that Bademgediği Tepe was part of a LH IIIC east Aegean pottery koine, which spread over the central and southern area of the East Aegean-West Anatolian Interface.

Dr. Yıldız is a historian of the political, cultural, religious, and intellectual life of late medieval Anatolia of the Seljuk, Mongol and Ottoman periods. She received her PhD from the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, University of Chicago (2006). Her current research focuses on Islamization, textual production and the transfer of knowledge, and Islamic/Ottoman medical textual traditions. She has served as assistant professor at Istanbul Bilgi University (2003–2010), researcher at the Orient-Institut Istanbul (2011–2016), and research fellow on the European Research Council Project entitled “The Islamisation of Anatolia, c. 1100-1500,” based at the School of History, University of St Andrews, Scotland, UK (2013–2016). Her ANAMED project “The Seljuk Empire of Anatolia” involves the completion of a nearly finished monograph – Mongol Rule in Seljuk Anatolia: the Politics of Conquest and History Writing, 1243–1282 – and the writing of a second monograph, The Seljuks of Anatolia: Empire-Building on the Frontiers of the Muslim World. Her recent publications include: “A Hanafi Law Manual in the Vernacular: Devletoğlu Yūsuf Balıḳesrī’s Turkish Verse Adaptation of the Hidāya-Wiqāya Textual Tradition for the Ottoman Sultan Murad II” (BSOAS 2017) and Islamic Literature and Intellectual Life in Fourteenth- and Fifteenth-century Anatolia (co-edited with A.C.S. Peacock, 2016).

``Dr. Çelik obtained her BA in Social and Political Sciences from Sabancı University in 2011. After completing her MA in Byzantine Studies at the University of Birmingham, she obtained her PhD at the same university in 2016. Her doctoral dissertation is entitled “A Historical Biography of Manuel II Palaiologos (1350–1425).” At ANAMED she will be working on a book manuscript based on her doctoral dissertation. Manuel Palaiologos was not only an emperor, but also a significant author who produced a massive oeuvre consisting of theological, philosophical, and literary works. Most of these works have not been studied. With her biography, she hopes to earn Manuel, who has been neglected as an author, a place in Byzantine literature. Through a close reading of Manuel’s complete oeuvre and various other primary sources, she will try to construct an in-depth portrait of the emperor as a ruler, a personality, and an author, as well as offering an insight into his world and times. As a biography that focuses not only on political events, but also on the personality, personal life, and literary output of the emperor, her work will offer a novel kind of biography writing in Byzantine studies. As the portrait of a multi-faceted Byzantine emperor, it can also appeal to medievalists and to a much wider audience.

Dr. Shliakhtin began his studies in the Department of History at Moscow State University and later moved to Central European University (Budapest) where he did his MA and PhD in Medieval Studies. Specializing in the literary history of the twelfth-century Mediterranean, his dissertation focused on the construction of the image of the Turks in Byzantine rhetoric. At ANAMED he will continue his research on the migration of Turkic pastoralists into Asia Minor and, more precisely, on the Byzantine response to this movement. His research will focus on the landscape of controlled communication that Byzantine emperors created in northern Bithynia and on the descriptions of this landscape in Byzantine literary sources. His aim is to study both the altered landscape in situ and the literary sources that describe the construction and use of these defensive structures in the Middle- and Late Byzantine periods. Additionally, he aims to work with twelfth-century coins and seals preserved in the collections in Istanbul. The study of the imagined landscape and surviving structures will constitute a chapter of his future monograph on the Byzantine perception of the Turks.

Dr. Angar studied for her Master’s Degree in Art History and Byzantine Studies at Freie Universität Berlin and Princeton University. She received her PhD at the University of Cologne (2012), where she is based as a lecturer in the Department of Byzantine Studies. In her dissertation she studied Byzantine head reliquaries and their reception in the West in the aftermath of the Conquest of Constantinople in 1204. Her research interests range from relics, Byzantine goldsmith art, and architectural representations in various media to issues of medieval and modern perceptions of Byzantium. Dr. Angar’s new project at ANAMED is dedicated to Galata/Pera during the Late Byzantine period. Based on archaeological, textual, and visual evidence, the primary aim is to provide a GIS-based, “deep map” of the Genoese commercial settlement on the other side (Gr. péra) – beyond the Golden Horn – which reflects the urban and social development of the powerful Italian sea republic.

Dr. Aruz is a Curator in Charge of the Department of Ancient Near Eastern Art at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, where she has worked for the last twenty-seven years. During that time she has focused attention on cultures in contact in the eastern Mediterranean and the Near East and has mounted a number of special exhibitions around this theme. Among them are Art of the First Cities: The Third Millennium B.C. from the Mediterranean to the Indus (2003) and Beyond Babylon: Art, Trade and Diplomacy in the Second Millennium B.C. (2008), both with extensive catalogues. Like her most recent exhibition, Assyria to Iberia at the Dawn of the Classical Age (2014) and its catalogue, these works focus on cross-cultural encounters and their impact on the visual arts. Dr. Aruz pursued her doctoral studies at the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University, and an adaptation of her 1986 dissertation was published in 2008 as Marks of Distinction: Seals and Cultural Exchange Between the Aegean and the Orient (ca. 2600–1360 B.C.). She has written many articles on both stamp and cylinder seals and their significance for understanding the complexities of intercultural exchange.

Dr. Balta is Research Director at the Institute of Historical Research at the National Hellenic Research Foundation (Athens, Greece). Her interests focus on topics related to the Economic and Social History of the Ottoman period, as well as the history and culture of the Rum Orthodox population of Anatolia. In addition to her commitment to various projects in Greece, Cyprus, and Türkiye, she has been invited to deliver seminars to university graduates in Greece and abroad. Her most recent books are: Gerçi Rum İsek de, Rumca Bilmez, Türkçe Söyleriz: Karamanlılar ve Karamanlıca Edebiyat Üzerine Araştırmalar (2014) and Population and Agricultural Production in Ottoman Morea (2015). Together with Mustafa Oğuz and Ali Efdal Özkul, she has recently published Kouklia in Nineteenth Century Cyprus. On the Ruins of a once Glorious Paphos (2015). She is co-editor of Muhacirname. Poetry’s Voice for the Karamanlidhes Refugees (2016). At ANAMED she completes the edition of Ottoman sources (Nüfus Defterleri, Temettuat Defteri) on Paphos, whose history in the Ottoman period is completely unknown apart from some fragmentary Western sources and certain demographic and financial data from Ottoman archival documents on the area.

Dr. Henderson, following his post-doctoral fellowships at the Smithsonian Institution and Oxford University, took up a lectureship in Sheffield University in 1991. In 2000 he was appointed to a full Professorship in Archaeological Science at Nottingham University where he has been Head of Department four times and Head of the School of Humanities. His research integrates the archaeology and science of materials, especially glassy materials. The Raqqa Ancient Industry Project, which he directed, produced comprehensive evidence for the production of early Islamic glass and glazed ceramics. His team provided the first link between the isotopic characterization of glass raw materials and glass (J. Henderson Ancient Glass CUP, 2013). Subsequently they have published scientific evidence for a new decentralized production model for (8th–14th century) glass – across a 2,000-mile area of the Silk Road (Henderson et al. Microchemical Journal 2016). The 8th–14th century Silk Road between western Asia and China is one of his primary research projects. Dr. Henderson has used an isotopic and elemental approach to the investigation of Late Bronze Age glasses, showing the existence of distinct production zones in Mesopotamia and Egypt and of sub-zones within Mesopotamia (Henderson et al. Mediterranean Archaeology and Archaeometry 2010). During his time as an ANAMED Fellow, he is writing up his collaborative interdisciplinary research on Hittite glass excavated from Kaman and Büklükale in central Anatolia, including some of the earliest glass vessels found anywhere.

Dr. Mathisen is a Professor of History, Classics, and Medieval Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He studies the ancient world, with specialties in prosopography, numismatics, late Roman law, and the society, culture, and religion of Late Antiquity. He has published over 100 scholarly articles and written or edited thirteen books, most recently Ancient Mediterranean Civilizations: Prehistory to 640 CE (2nd ed., Oxford UP, 2014). He is the Editor of Oxford Studies in Late Antiquity, the Founding Editor and Editor Emeritus of the Journal of Late Antiquity, past President of the Byzantine Studies Association of North America and the Society for Late Antiquity, and Director of the Biographical Database for Late Antiquity Project. He has been supported by the American Council of Learned Societies, the American Philosophical Society, the Howard Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and, most recently, the Guggenheim Foundation. During his sojourn at ANAMED, he will be engaged in a project entitled “A Prosopographical, Geographical, and Architectural Evaluation of a Constantinopolitan Foundation Legend,” which will investigate the historical, geographical, and architectural backgrounds of increasingly elaborate legends relating to the emperor Constantine’s foundation of the city of Constantinople in 330 CE.

Dr. Rutherford is a historian of ancient Mediterranean religion, and his work explores connections between Greece and other ancient cultures of Western Asia. He has published monographs on ancient Greek hymns (Pindar’s Paeans, 2001) and on the operation of religious networks in ancient Greece (State Pilgrims and Sacred Observers, 2013). He is particularly interested in the civilizations of Anatolia in the Late Bronze Age (Hittites and Luwians) and their links to ancient Greece, and is an editor of two collected volumes on this subject: Anatolian Interfaces (2008) and Luwian Identities (2013). His work at ANAMED focuses on the religious systems of Anatolia in the Late Bronze Age, and on the relation between these and ancient Greek polytheism. Questions he is interested in are: what similarities exist between Anatolian and Greek religion? Is there evidence for interaction between them or borrowing, and, if so, where and when did it happen? and what insights can be gained from a comparative approach, using the evidence of one of them to supplement understanding of the other? While at ANAMED he hopes also to take the opportunity of being in Türkiye to enhance his knowledge of the archaeological evidence for Anatolian religion.

Dr. Sàghy is an Associate Professor at the Medieval Studies Department, Central European University, former academic director of the Hungarian Cultural Institute in Paris, and a historian interested in transitions and transformations from Late Antiquity to the Middle Ages. She exploits hagiography to understand the religious aspirations and the social and cultural politics of a period. She writes about controversial bishops, eccentric ascetics, and good empresses, such as Damasus of Rome, Saint Jerome, Saint Martin of Tours, Saint Genovefa of Paris and now, at ANAMED, on Empress Piroska/Eirene. Her books include Martyrs and Poems: The Cult of the Saints in Rome under Damasus, A. D. 366–384, Saint Martin of Tours: Asceticism and Power in Late Antiquity (both in Hungarian), the proceedings of a conference series on Pagans and Christians in Late Antique Rome, and a bilingual Latin-French text edition with commentary of Pierre Dubois’s De la récupération de la Terre Sainte. While at ANAMED, Dr. Sághy will work on the saints venerated in the Pantokrator Monastery. Dr. Sághy has taught courses on Religion and Society in Late Antiquity, Saint Augustine and the Confessions, Women and Christianity, Monasticism and Hagiography, Friendship from Antiquity to the Middle Ages, and Angevin Europe at CEU Budapest as well as in Tours, Poitiers, Turku, Warsaw, and Paris. She organizes summer courses at CEU and at the Hungarian Academy in Rome.

Dr. Hardy is Adjunct Professor at the American University of Rome (AUR) and Honorary Research Associate at the Institute of Archaeology, University College London (UCL). His doctoral research focused on the law, ethics and politics of cultural heritage work; destruction of cultural property and propaganda; and trafficking of antiquities in the Cyprus Conflict. Since then, he has focused on trafficking of cultural goods in the conflict in Syria and Iraq and the history of such trafficking by armed groups and repressive regimes around the world.

Dr. Hardy's ANAMED research regards action for the cultural heritage crisis in Syria that is based in or goes through Türkiye. He is assessing what action is being taken or avoided; how it is being realised or prevented; and what can be done - ethically and sustainably - to support the resident and refugee communities, cultural heritage professionals and cultural heritage assets that have been affected by the crisis.

He blogs open-source research and analysis of the conflict antiquities trade and other aspects of the illicit antiquities trade: https://conflictantiquities.wordpress.com/

My studies focused on archaeological methodology and ancient history with a four-year degree in Conservation of Cultural Heritage and a dissertation in Egyptology at the University of Pisa. My training and research activities were particularly aimed at acquiring multidisciplinary skills through international study experiences in India, UK, Syria, Egypt, China and Belgium. I am particularly interested by the issues of cultural diversity, the complexity of human communication and human behaviors, in relation with interdisciplinary topics such as a sense of heritage, heritage interpretation and cultural consciousness in different contexts of contemporary and ancient societies.