Mr. Ben Ismail is a PhD candidate in Histories and Cultures of Muslim Societies in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at Harvard University. His ANAMED project forms part of his dissertation research on the relationship between the Ottoman Empire and the Regency of Tunis from the late-nineteenth to the early-twentieth century. Although the Regency of Tunis was nominally considered to be an Ottoman eyalet, the actions of the Bey of Tunis were largely unconstrained by the central Ottoman government. The establishment of a French protectorate over Tunis in 1881 presented an additional challenge to Ottoman claims over the distant North African province. Despite this, Ben Ismail’s dissertation demonstrates that crucial political and cultural links persisted between Tunis and Istanbul well into the twentieth century. Using archives in Arabic, French, and Ottoman Turkish, his work seeks to bring the Regency of Tunis into the fold of late Ottoman imperial history. Specifically, it aims to provide a new genealogy of Tunisian nationalism, tracing its roots back to the Ottoman Empire.

Ms. Bolel is a PhD candidate in the Near and Middle Eastern Studies program at the University of Washington. In 2014 she received her MSc in Sociology from London School of Economics and Political Science. She is interested in experiences of poverty and marginalization in nineteenth-century Ottoman port cities, and her current research focuses on the historical conditions which drove and sustained intracommunal exclusion in Ottoman urban settings. Her ANAMED project concentrates on the period of 1847–1923 in the Jewish community of Izmir and how changing definitions of marginality determined the practice of coercive ordering of the poor in this rapidly changing port city. To understand this microcosm in which social exclusion of the poor was the element for maintaining the cosmic order, she employs sociological and historico-spatial methods. Her study aims to contribute to a presentation of the Ottoman past while giving voice to excluded members of the community who have long remained on the margins of a minority, as well as the margins of Ottoman and Jewish historiography.

Mr. Bozovic is a PhD candidate at the Department of Oriental studies of Faculty of Philology in Belgrade. His doctoral thesis is titled “Islamization of Anatolia as seen in popular narratives of 12th, 13th and 14th century” and it focuses on the religious transformation of Anatolia in aspect of its population and especially its population’s intercommunal and interreligious interactions and islamization processes. In the course of his research, he works on determining ethnical, religious and social self-identification of Anatolian population on the basis of Byzantine and Arabic popular narratives. Nonetheless, his project at ANAMED is focusing on how the events such as dissolving of the Byzantine Empire, coming of a vast population of Turkish nomads, Islamic rule and Islam as religion influenced the population of Anatolia, and especially perception of them by the local Muslim population in the popular narratives of Anatolia, i.e. Danishmend-name, Vilayet-name, Battal-name and Saltuk-name. The main premise of his research is the reinterpretation of the islamization of Anatolia through reexamination of the texts and their influences using Brian Stock’s ‘interpretative communities’ concept along the lines of Tijana Krstic’s and Ahmet Karamustafa’s research.

Mr. Busacca is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Anthropology at Stanford University. His dissertation project focuses on the practice of wall painting and the sensory experience of paintings at Neolithic Çatalhöyük. While a great deal of scholarly attention has been devoted to the iconographic and formal properties of Çatalhöyük paintings, this research explicitly shifts the focus onto the materiality of painted plasters and on their daily interactions with humans at the site. During his residency at ANAMED, Gesualdo is working on several aspects of his dissertation, including a GIS spatial analysis of Çatalhöyük paintings, a stratigraphical study of painted plaster samples from the site to investigate practices of repetitive painting, and a lighting analysis in a 3D environment to reconstruct the experience of paintings within their original contexts. His interest in the prehistory of Anatolia has begun in 2012, when he was an exchange student in Türkiye as part of his MA in Archaeology at the University of Catania, Italy. His master thesis, focusing on animal symbolism and human-animal relationships at the Aceramic Neolithic site of Göbekli Tepe, has been recently published in an article on Cambridge Archaeological Journal.

Ms. Cole is a PhD candidate in the History Department at Yale University. She is broadly interested in environmental history, histories of technology and capital, histories of sovereignty, and imperial history. At ANAMED, she will work on her dissertation research, which uses a network of local capitalists and notables to explore the creation of multi-imperial space at the juncture of the Ottoman, British, and Qajar states in what is today southern Iraq. Her dissertation will argue that the existence of three competing imperial states alongside powerful local actors forced the three states to adjust the goals and applications of their imperial projects to fit the social, cultural, and environmental characteristics of southern Iraq. In particular, the new technologies of modernity – steamships and land tenure – were appropriated and used by local as well as imperial actors.

Ms. Demirtiken is a PhD candidate in the Classics Department at the University of Edinburgh, where she focuses on social history of Byzantium with Profs. Niels Gaul and Jim Crow. She holds two Master’s degrees—one in Archaeology and History of Art from Koç University in Istanbul and a second one in Comparative History from Central European University in Budapest. Her doctoral thesis, “Monastic Communities and Monasteries of Constantinople, 1261–1350,” aims to provide a social history of Constantinopolitan monks and nuns and monasteries’ wider role in the city’s society. Drawing on a rich body of sources—histories, letters, vitae, miracula, monastic discourses, patriarchal acts, architecture, and artistic programs—she seeks to understand how monastics lived in late Byzantine Constantinople, and how early Palaiologan monasticism in the city related to the macro-and meso-level social structures. While in residence at ANAMED, Elif conducts her thesis research on the material evidence and consults the reports of rescue excavations in the archives of the Istanbul Archaeology Museums, which present the only remaining evidence of numerous now-lost Byzantine structures. Elif also participates in 'Crossing Frontiers: Christians and Muslims and their Art in Eastern Anatolia and the Caucasus,' a travelling research seminar program organized by Prof. Anthony Eastmond, Courtauld Institute of Art and supported by the Getty Foundation.

Ms. Mazzucato is a Phd Candidate in Stanford University. She completed MA in Archaeology at Bologna University and MSc in GIS and Spatial Analysis at UCL. Her research investigates early patterns of settled life and social differentiation through the study of Neolithic megasites in Anatolia and the Levant. By focusing on these large Late Neolithic population centers, her project aims to rethink the nature of the networks of social engagement that emerge in the early Holocene within early agriculture communities. It intends to engage with the recognition of horizontal social differences and bonds, as well as to identify the dense variety of nested and/or cross-cutting networks of social relations that characterize the way these communities functioned in the absence of clear evidence for social stratification. As a methodological tool, the research will make use of formal socio-material network methods at an intra-site level applied to the Çatalhöyük dataset through diachronic and synchronic analyses. Mazzucato has been part of the Çatalhöyük Research team since 2009 as the main GIS specialist. She additionally spent two years (2011–2012) working as a researcher at the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology of Oxford University.

Ms. Uzdurum is a Phd Candidate who focuses on the changes in the life style and the emerging individual trends of the residents at the Neolithic village of Aşıklı Höyük (8500–7400 cal. BC), through the analysis of kerpiç, the principal architectural element that may reflect the social fabric of the community. Her research aims to study the social and technical processes involved in kerpiç production and use, the relationship between the material choices, social values, and individual trends reflected through different kerpiç compositions, drivers of the changes in production over time, and how these changes relate to the social, cultural and economic aspects of the Aşıklı community. The expected outcomes will contribute to our understanding of the social technologies of the early sedentary communities within the Neolithization process in Central Anatolia. This research applies geoarcheological methods, including soil micromorphology analysis on the composition of kerpiç, mortar, and plaster, to reconstruct the chaines opératoire of kerpiç production and use at Aşıklı Höyük. The use of soil micromorphology in answering questions about the social aspects of prehistoric communities is generally an undervalued research area in Turkish prehistoric archaeology, it is expected that this project will contribute to Turkish archaeology by providing an example of applying new approaches and methods.

Dr. Arslan received his Ph.D. from the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at Harvard University in 2017 and will start working as an Assistant Professor of English Language and Comparative Literature at Koç University in 2018. As an ANAMED Fellow, he is working on his book project, ``Ambivalences of Ottoman Modernity: Nahda, Tanzimat, and World Literature,`` which undermines the typical scholarly view that nahda—which refers to Arab cultural revival or “awakening”—and tanzimat—which refers to both statewide imperial reforms and the late Ottoman Turkish literature—were two separate movements that took shape solely under the Western influence. To show that these movements were instead constitutive of each other, his monograph re-examines nahda and tanzimat under the larger umbrella term “Ottoman modernity” and re-contextualizes modern Arabic and Turkish literatures of the nineteenth and early twentieth century within a multilingual Ottoman cultural milieu instead of their respective national communities. ``Ambivalences of Ottoman Modernity`` also proposes that fundamental notions in the world literature scholarship need to be revised for a nuanced understanding of the late Ottoman Empire, hence giving a close reading of Arabic and Turkish literary texts to provide new theoretical perspectives on translation, intertextuality, and world literature.

Dr. Bayraktar holds a joint PhD in History from Boğaziçi University and EHESS (2015). In his dissertation, he investigates political, social, and economic transformation of an Ottoman peripheral province, i.e. Diyarbekir, by focusing on the transformation of family estates into modern private property. His research interests include the nineteenth-century transformation of hereditary land holdings, local politics, and political and patronage networks in the Ottoman Empire. During his stay at ANAMED, he plans to expand his dissertation to a manuscript by adding another peripheral province, Albania. His project explores the phenomena of Ottoman borderlands from a comparative perspective. By focusing on the structures of local politics in Ottoman Kurdistan and Albania, his research conceptualizes a colonial/imperial state building in a comparative account of Hazro (in northeastern Diyarbekir) and Dibra (in western Macedonia) throughout the nineteenth century. Underlining the continuity of the local notables in the Ottoman borderlands, his project aims to conceptualise the Tanzimat reforms in borderlands as a negotiated space between the local political actors and the imperial officials and revise the idealised view of the central state. Elaborating upon the difference compared to administrative practices in the central provinces, the project plans to investigate the trajectory of imperial/colonial reforms in the imperial borderlands.

Dr.Burlot specialized in ceramic studies during his PhD at the University of Lyon (France) following his education in archaeometry (2012) and in rescue archaeology (2013) at the University of Bordeaux (France) and Fribourg (Switzerland). Carried out in the framework of the POMEDOR project “People, Pottery and Food in the Medieval Eastern Mediterranean” (http://www.pomedor.mom.fr/, directed by S.Y. Waksman and funded by the French National Research Agency), it dealt with the contextualization and the manufacturing technologies of early Turkish pottery (Beylik and early-Ottoman) produced in western Anatolia, by combining both archaeological and archaeometric approaches. It involved collaborations with international excavation teams such as the Austrian and German archaeological institutes (at Ephesus, Miletus and Pergamum), and Harvard University (Sardis). His project at ANAMED extends this research, both in the Byzantine and Turkish capital and in eastern Anatolia, by studying two assemblages coming from the sites of Kinet Höyük (region of Iskenderun, excavations directed by M.-H. Gates and S. Redford) and Küçükyalı (Asian side of Istanbul’s Greater Municipality, excavations directed by A. Ricci) dated to the 13th and 14th centuries. The purpose of this study is to compare contemporary manufacturing processes, to shed light on the way these productions and their techniques were diffused, and on how they were influenced by fashions and tastes that vary according to the contacts between populations.

Dr. Dardeniz has formal training both in archaeology and history of art as well as chemistry. Her specialization is on the vitreous materials (glass, faience, frit), their technologies, and integrated crafts during the second millennium BC in the Near East. She focuses on connections, especially between Anatolia and Egypt, in terms of raw material usage and preferred technologies. She studies the development and spread of vitrified material production technologies, resource procurement, manipulation of raw materials, technical know-how of artisans as well as integrated and multifunctional crafts including but not limited to metallurgy. Dr. Dardeniz has been involved in archaeological excavations and surveys across Anatolia since 2005. She uses complementary methods of archaeology and archaeometry on the vitreous corpora of major Anatolian sites. As for the ANAMED Postdoc Fellowship, she focuses on the second and early first millennia BC vitreous materials from Anatolia; she plans to assess similarities and differences, patterns of continuity and discontinuity, artisanship in the vitreous technologies in addition to integrated technologies and industries from a wider perspective. She hopes to establish new connections between Anatolia and its neighboring regions, especially Egypt in regard to vitreous materials and integrated craftsmanship, which will contribute to a new line of archaeological and archaeometric research in Türkiye. Dr. Dardeniz is also the Machteld Johanna Mellink fellow of 2017–2018.

Dr. Ergun is an archaeobotanist who holds a PhD from Istanbul University Prehistory Department and Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne University Doctoral School of Archaeology (co-tutelle, 2016), and an MA from Istanbul University Prehistory Department (2009). Since her first encounter with archaeobotany in 2005, she has been investigating people-plant interactions and their effects on the economical and socio-cultural lives of communities with a special interest in the beginnings of agriculture. Her project at ANAMED considers this pivotal transition process and focuses on a key Aceramic site, Aşıklı Höyük (8500–7400 cal BC), which represents the beginnings of sedentary life and agriculture in Central Anatolia through its long and uninterrupted occupation sequence. The project's aim is to explore the plant-based activities involving food preparation and consumption throughout 9th-millennium Aşıklı, by focusing on the plant remains from buildings that reflect communal or special uses, and comparing them with buildings that represent a more household aspect. Alongside contributing to our understanding on the communal and household activities and their evolution, the project intends to provide new insights to the socio-cultural life of Aşıklı community which is crucial for assessing the adoption of an agricultural way of life and Neolithization process, both in local and regional contexts.

Dr. Haddow is a bioarchaeologist who obtained his PhD at the Institute of Archaeology, University College London in 2012. Since 2004 he has been a member of the Çatalhöyük Research Project where his research is focused on Neolithic funerary practices, in particular delayed burial and other secondary treatments of the body, including the retrieval, circulation and redeposition of crania. He is currently investigating whether certain individuals at Çatalhöyük underwent defleshing and/or desiccation prior to interment. The aim is to provide novel scientific evidence for these funerary treatments based on histological analysis of bone in order to assess the degree of cortical bone bioerosion. A lack of bioerosion may indicate an attempt to halt the decomposition process, either by removal of the soft tissue or rudimentary mummification. The research also employs 3D modelling techniques and GIS spatial analyses. The application of these techniques has proven highly successful for recording the complicated sequence of intercutting burials found under house floors at Çatalhöyük and permits me to more accurately plot the varied spatial distribution of complete skeletons as well as loose skeletal elements such as crania and mandibles recovered from the site in a variety of depositional contexts. Ultimately, his goal is to expand this research to other sites in the Near East while developing new methodologies to further explore the nature of secondary burial practices beyond the Neolithic period.

Dr. Lau holds a PhD in Archaeology from UCLA (2016). Her research examines how people have coordinated resource exploitation in the past and how such cooperation among ancient people, particularly in agropastoral production, elicited change or was changed by shifts in sociopolitical relationships. Her analyzes of zooarchaeological, including biogeochemical analyses, material from the Halaf period site of Domuztepe (ca. 6000–5450 cal. BCE) in southeastern Türkiye document social and economic cooperation and coordination among participants in both daily subsistence activities and large-scale communal feasting events. Her project at ANAMED “Mobility and Resource Cooperation in the Late Neolithic Halaf Period” is a comparative project aimed at contextualizing the movement she identified in her previous work at Domuztepe within the larger Halaf cultural sphere by examining agropastoral production, evidence of exchange and interaction in raw and finished goods, and evidence of collective action events. Combined, these processes will shed light on this important period of Near Eastern history during which people began to innovate with new forms of social organization that mature into more traditionally archaeologically-identifiable forms in the succeeding Chalcolithic period.

Dr. Radloff has a PhD in Mediterranean Archaeology at the University at Buffalo, State University of New York and an MA in Classics from Brock University, Canada (2011). Her research interests concern the role of the maritime environment in urban planning and the Hellenistic polis, which was the subject of her dissertation, “Mechanisms of Power and Control: the Role of Harbor-City Interaction in the Socio-Political Dynamics of Hellenistic Asia Minor.” She is currently involved in fieldwork at the Burgaz Harbors Project in Türkiye and the Lechaion Harbor and Settlement Land Project in Greece. Based on her work at Burgaz, Ms. Radloff’s research project at ANAMED is “Knidian Harbors: Networks of Cultural Interaction in the Southeast Aegean.” The project analyzes the physical and spatial relationship between the harbors and urban plans of “Old” and “New” Knidos, and their connection to other harbors, anchorages, and transit routes on and around the Knidian peninsula. By contextualizing the “Knidia” within the southeast Aegean and broader Anatolian and Mediterranean world, this research aims to evaluate the “Knidia” and its regional networks and to examine the role of the maritime environment in negotiating maritime space and poliadic boundaries on an intra- and inter-regional scale.

Dr. Çıpa is Associate Professor of Ottoman History at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He is the author of The Making of Selim: Succession, Legitimacy, and Memory in the Early Modern Ottoman World (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2017) and co-editor, with Emine Fetvacı, of Writing History at the Ottoman Court: Editing the Past, Fashioning the Future (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013). The primary focus of his work is the history and historiography of the Ottoman Empire, with a specific emphasis on dissident movements and succession struggles. He is also interested in issues related to the socioeconomic history of the Ottoman Empire within the larger framework of military-agrarian societies of the late Middle Ages and the early modern era. His book project at ANAMED, “Popular Uprisings in Pre-Modern Ottoman Lands,” investigates multiple waves of popular rebellions that tested the foundations of the Ottoman state over the course of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.

Dr. Durak, after receiving his Ph.D. from Harvard University in History and Middle Eastern Studies in 2008, started teaching at the Department of History at Boğaziçi University, Istanbul, Türkiye. He has been teaching courses on the history of the medieval Mediterranean region, the Byzantine history, and the history of Byzantine Constantinople. The main areas of his research interest include Byzantine and medieval Islamic trade and networks of exchange, Byzantine historical geography, geographical imagination in the Middle Ages, and medieval imperial ideology. His project for the ANAMED is a comprehensive examination of medicinal substances that were imported into Byzantium from/through the Islamic Near East, especially in the middle Byzantine period (7th to the 12th centuries). Most of the plant products (spices/herbs), mineral substances, and animal products - named aromatics by the Byzantines- were primarily employed in pharmacology as well as perfume making and cooking. He attempts to answer questions concerning the ratio of foreign aromatics to the local ones, their origins and possible routes as well as whether they were finished products or raw materials. Studying medical and non-medical historical sources in Byzantine writing, he investigate the geographical as well as class distribution of imported aromatics. Moreover, he pays attention to the perception of these “exotica” in the Byzantine imagination.

Dr. Ersoy is Associate Professor at the History Department at Boğaziçi University. His work deals with the history of the Late Ottoman Empire with a special focus on the changing role and status of visual culture during a period of westernizing change. A major aim in his work has been to link visuality with rising discourses of locality and authenticity in the late Ottoman context, thereby situating art and architecture within the broader fields of cross-cultural studies and historiography. His recent book, Architecture and the Late Ottoman Historical Imaginary, links the visual traces of modernity, particularly the newfangled revivalist movement in art and architecture, with changing perceptions of the historical past in the late Ottoman realm. In its cross-disciplinary scope, the book provides an intellectual depth of field to the historicist pursuits of late Ottoman artists and architects, investigating the rise of a modern culture of authenticity in the late Ottoman context. Dr. Ersoy’s current project involves a study of photography and other means of mechanical image-reproduction in the late Ottoman world. Particularly focusing on the late nineteenth-century illustrated journals, he aims to understand the broader impact of this new media regime in the context of Ottoman culture.

Dr. Kaye is an ancient historian and archaeologist with a focus on the political economy of the Hellenistic kingdoms of the eastern Mediterranean. He holds a PhD from UC-Berkeley (Graduate Group in Ancient History and Mediterranean Archaeology, 2012) and formerly held a Fulbright Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Haifa, Israel. Currently, he is Assistant Professor in the Department of History at Michigan State University. At ANAMED, his project takes up the surprising success of the Attalids of Pergamon, late Hellenistic upstarts who managed to rapidly integrate large parts of Anatolia and the Aegean into a coherent empire around 150 BC. The project, “Overnight Empire, the Attalids of Pergamon and Anatolia,” looks at how Pergamene habits of taxation, an innovative monetary system, imperial patronage of civic institutions and ecumenical cultural politics solidified Attalid rule in Anatolia. The project highlights the interface between royal and civic institutions and identities, both those of the Aegean polis as well as those of Anatolian polities built on different models. Dr. Kaye is also a field archaeologist, numismatist, and epigrapher, working in Mersin/Rough Cilicia under the directorship of Günder Varinlioğlu (Boğsak Archaeological Survey/Mimar Sinan University), investigating Dana Adası and Aphrodisias in Cilicia.

Dr. Savvas Kyriakidis received his PhD from the University of Birmingham with a thesis on the military history of the later Byzantine Empire. A substantially revised version of this thesis was published as monograph with the title Warfare in Late Byzantium, 1204–1453 (Leiden: Brill 2011). He has been a research fellow at ANAMED as well as at Princeton University, the University of Johannesburg and the New Europe College in Bucharest. He has taught Byzantine history at Sabanci University and at the Open University of Cyprus. He has published articles on the nature of warfare in Byzantium, the late medieval Balkans and in Frankish Greece. His project at ANAMED focuses on the nature of mercenary military service in Byzantium

Dr.Minawi is an assistant professor of history and the director of the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Initiative (OTSI) at Cornell University. His research focuses on the late 19th-century trans-imperial socio-diplomatic history. He is currently working on two research projects. The first is a follow-up to his first book, The Ottoman Scramble for Africa: Empire and Diplomacy in the Sahara and the Hijaz (Stanford University Press, 2016), and is tentatively titled Ottoman-Ethiopian Relations and the Geopolitics of Resistance: South-South Diplomacy in the Age of Colonialism. His second research project focuses on the lived experiences of “Arab” Ottomans living in Istanbul at the turn of the 20th century. Minawi holds a PhD in History and Middle Eastern & Islamic Studies from New York University, an MA in History from the University of Toronto, and a Bachelor of Engineering and Management from McMaster University, in Hamilton, Canada. He travels extensively in Europe, the Middle East, and East Africa as he continues to conduct research on the history of the region with a focus on Istanbul and its relations with other European and African imperial centers of power.

Dr. Tatbul holds a PhD in Settlement Archaeology from Middle East Technical University (2017), Türkiye and an MA in Archaeology from Leiden University, The Netherlands (2007). His research project at ANAMED “Changing Dynamics in the Middle Byzantine Komana Pontica, Central Black Sea, Türkiye” aims to enlighten the social, political, economic and religious changes and interactions between Byzantine and Turkic communities during the penetration of Turkic tribes into Anatolia and under further Danishmend/Seljuk rule. He will conduct an initial literature survey that will guide him in the future planned intensive surface surveys in the previously identified Middle Byzantine church sites during the extensive surveys by Burcu Erciyas between 2004–2008 in the territory of Komana Pontica. His future intensive survey data, with the guidance of literature survey, in the church sites will try to explore their function, character, contemporaneity and if any hierarchical order, their fate during the penetration of Turkic tribes and Danishmend/Seljuk rule and site preference strategies under the changing dramatic political, social, economic and religious conditions of the period. His research method will integrate literature survey of the period, intensive surface collection and geophysical prospection of the intended church sites and excavation data of an already excavated church site at Hamamtepe, Komana Pontica.

Mr. Han is a PhD candidate in the Department of History of Architecture at Istanbul Technical University. His research interest are 18th century port cities on the Mediterranean, hydraulic and coastal engineering, and urban planning in early modern Ottoman cities. His dissertation tittle is ‘Langa Yenikapı Land Reclamation Area and the Formation of istanbul's Yalı Neighborhood (1750-1900)’. During his fellowship at ANAMED he will be focusing on the reclaiming of land in the Theodosian Harbour and the construction of the Yalı Neighborhood which was built on a land fill in 1760s. He examines the construction techniques related to the production of the solid foundation in water as well as the constructing of piers, streets, public spaces, fountains, coffeehouse, storehouses, manufacturing facilities and residential buildings on the newly reclaimed land. He also researches the response of the wakf administration, city’s authorities and tenants following the two earthquakes in 1766 and 1893, and the fire in 1782.

Dr. Born is a senior art historian researcher, titular member of the Belgium Royal Academy of Archaeology. Specialist in Northern European art (15th-16th c.), her scholarly interests also include the Renaissance artist’s socio-cultural status, the legacy of antiquity and Italian influence in the North and the diplomatic ties and artistic output between the Habsburg and the Ottoman Empire. Her project will assess the impact of Pieter Coecke’s İstanbul stay on his intellectual development and work. The voyage, a decisive milestone, as he studied first-hand Antique, Byzantine and Ottoman arts and architecture, was the trigger of his keen interest for architecture. From his year in Kostantiniyye, he brought back a corpus of drawings that became a fecund material for the works produced after his return, including series of engravings. With the exception of the view of the Hippodrome, Coecke’s ethnographic reportage, with landscapes and city views (Istanbul and Topkapı Sarayı), has not been critically studied to assess the authenticity of his work. Mapping places and monuments will allow visualizing the urban landscapes in Coecke’s oeuvre and contextualizing his live experience in the multivalent cultures of the Ottoman Empire will provide clarity, nuance and new perspectives of his work as a historical trustworthy source.

Dr. Davis received her PhD in 2017 from Koç University. Her dissertation project, 'Sensorial Urbanism and Smellscapes: Documenting and Exhibiting Istanbul’s Cultural Heritage,' explores the intangible heritage and history of place and people through a sensory, embodied experience. She curated the exhibition ‘Scent and the City’ at the Research Center for Anatolian Civilizations in Spring 2016. She has worked with several cultural institutions, including the Penn Cultural Heritage Center, the Allard Pierson Museum, the Smithsonian’s Freer and Sackler Galleries, and Cornucopia Magazine. Her research project at ANAMED examines sensory history through digital tools by exploring historical spice and aromatic trade routes with Geographic Information Systems (GIS). She is using GIS to visualize and analyze the changing, but perhaps not declining, patterns of the spice trade in the Ottoman Empire. In addition to contributing to a more in-depth interpretation of the complicated spice trade in the 16th century, this project also helps generate a more complete understanding of sensory history and the smellscapes of this historic neighborhood of Eminönü.

Dr.Gruber’s primary fields of research include paintings of the Prophet Muhammad and Islamic ascension texts and images, about which she has written three books and edited several volumes of articles. She also pursues research in Islamic book arts and codicology, having authored the online catalogue of Islamic calligraphies in the Library of Congress as well as edited the volume entitled The Islamic Manuscript Tradition. Her third field of specialization is modern Islamic visual and material culture, in particular within post-revolutionary Iran and contemporary Türkiye. A full list of her scholarly publications, exhibitions, op-ed articles, and interviews can be accessed online at: https://umich.academia.edu/ChristianeGruber. While in Istanbul this year, Prof. Gruber will explore late Ottoman amuletic and devotional arts, focusing in particular on illustrated devotional manuals, seal paintings and designs, and verbal icons (hilyes) of the Prophet Muhammad, which frequently were made and used for talismanic and/or curative purposes. Such materials highlight the role of the visual arts in crafting and conveying blessings (baraka), a magico-religious practice that is a hallmark of Ottoman-Islamic pietistic traditions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Ms. Rembart is a PhD student at the Department of Classical Archaeology of the University of Salzburg. Since her master thesis the focus of her research lies on pottery studies from the Eastern Mediterranean region in Hellenistic and Roman Times. In all the years that she has worked in Ephesus/Türkiye and Syene/Egypt her interest on the acculturation of these areas increased, especially how the Hellenistic and Roman world had an influence on daily life in the provinces. On this matter the economic archaeology also plays an important role. Trade relationships show the interaction of different regions throughout the Mediterranean no matter how far away they are.

At ANAMED she will analyse the Roman pottery from the Central Lydia Archaeological Survey, especially from the Marmara Lake Basin. It will be interesting to see how Lydia developed and how the region was influenced at that time in comparison with neighbouring regions, like Ionia.

Dr. Simonishvili was director of the International Research Center in the Visual Arts affiliated with the Georgian State Museum of Folk and Applied Art in Tbilisi (2015–2017) and director of the collaborative research and exhibition project between the Georgian National Museum and the Metropolitan Museum of Art supported by UNESCO: Re-installation of the Medieval Collections of the Georgian National Museum (2008–2013). She has been associate professor in the Department of Art History at the Tbilisi State University (1995–2006). Dr. Simonishvili is the recipient of several fellowships, including A.v. Humboldt and Gerda Henkel fellowships in Germany; W. Fulbright, A. Mellon and P. Mellon fellowships in the USA. Currently Dr. Simonishvili works on various scientific and exhibition projects, including two books. Her project at ANAMED “Images as Social Agents: The Monumental Façade Relief Sculpture of St. John Baptist Church of Oshki (10th century) and Its Role in the Formation of the Unified Medieval Georgian Statehood” is part of an interdisciplinary exploration of the social dynamics of images. Taking medieval Georgia as an example, this study will explore the processes and effects of cross-cultural exchange. It will analyze the use of texts and images as instruments in the establishment of identity, and the process of cultural transformation as evidenced by specific local development. The research examines the sculpted décor of the main church of the monastery of Oshki (963–976) in the historic southwestern region of Georgia, formerly the principality of Tao-Klardjeti and now part of northwestern Türkiye, as a system of symbols, which give the images a social power. It will explore the concept of such a system of symbols and its transfer and reuse in different political and artistic contexts.

Dr. Thissen is owner of TACB, a company based in Amsterdam analysing prehistoric potteries from Türkiye, the Balkans, currently also from the Netherlands. From his early involvement with the Ilıpınar excavations (NW Türkiye) and his PhD research (University of Leiden) onward, his areas of interest are issues of neolithisation, connections and transformations between Türkiye and Europe; the ways people use to adopt new technologies; how they build, transmit and maintain traditions and form communities of practice; and by the perception of function and use of pottery through contextual and residue analysis. Since 2007 involved as ceramic specialist at Barcın Höyük all these foci of interest are coming together: the site is established by early farming communities coming from elsewhere, possibly Central Anatolia. Pottery is already known, but evolves in diverging ways compared to the homeland. As an ANAMED fellow, his work integrates Barcın residue data and pottery development with stratigraphy and on-site spatial arrangements. He tries to understand emerging diversity in the pottery and contrast it with an increasing sophistication in dairying processes. Indications that similar patterns of pottery use and variability are part of the general dispersal of farming across Europe make the responsibility to have the Barcın ceramic sequence as reliable as possible an essential one.

Dr. Vryzidis is an art historian who received his PhD from SOAS, University of London in 2015. His project, which stems from his doctoral research, examines the evolution of Greek ecclesiastical aesthetic as reflected on costume during the first centuries of the Ottoman period. The core of his investigation lies in the fertilization of Byzantine tradition with loans from Ottoman secular aesthetic. The new, syncretic dress code adopted by the Greek Church delivered an immediately readable message produced by the juxtaposition of the Byzantine and Ottoman systems of symbolism. The interplay between Christian iconography and aniconicity, the selective use of foreign textiles and the updating of Byzantine iconographic models are only some of the issues raised by the pluralist, yet coherent Greek aesthetic. Essentially, this study intends to reveal the process of active reception and acculturation in relation to Greek clerical costume, and show the different paths that this Byzantine afterlife took in the Ottoman cultural environment.

Dr. Skartsi received her PhD from University of Birmingham in 2009. Her research at ANAMED focuses on the study of the Ottoman period material coming from the so-called ‘House of Bailo’, an important monumental complex at the historic centre of Chalcis (then known as Eğriboz) in Central Greece. The archaeological study proved that the medieval palace of the Venetian period that existed in this area was inhabited continuously during the four centuries of the Ottoman rule by people who were constantly in contact with the Imperial court. The study of the stratigraphy and excavation finds gave new evidence for the everyday life and the identity of those living in the complex throughout the period in question (16th – early 19th c.). The finds included various classes of pottery and small finds, as well as a unique hoard concealed before 1688 and containing the equipment of an Ottoman pharmacy. These objects can only be studied in conjunction with information about the practice of medicine and the preparation of remedies, for which the primary center was Istanbul. She is expecting that the study of this material, combined with the evidence from the architectural restoration, will throw light on various cultural, social and economic aspects of a typical provincial Ottoman city. It will reveal how Eğriboz was integrated to and participated in the socio-economic structures of the Empire, retaining close commercial relations with Istanbul and other major centres both in Eastern and Western Mediterranean. It will also prove the complexity of the socioeconomic patterns that prevailed during the Ottoman period.

Dr. Armstrong received her BA in Greek (ancient and medieval), MA in Greek and Latin, and her PhD degree in Byzantine & Ottoman Archaeology from The Queen’s University, Belfast. Her research concerns ceramics found during the underwater excavations of the shipwreck known as Çamaltı Burnu I, which was carried out by a team of Turkish scholars under the direction of Professor Dr. Nergis Günsenin. She is responsible for preparing the publication of the ceramics both as a body of primary data and as a source for trade connections and cultural interactions. Çamaltı Burnu I is important archaeologically because it is the first wreck dated to the thirteenth century AD excavated in the Mediterranean. A concentration of cooking pots and food preparation vessels along with roof tiles for covering an open fire indicated the presence of a galley at the ship’s stern. Other domestic ceramic wares found in the bow indicated a living area designated for the crew. It is the ceramics from both these locations which she is preparing as a contribution towards the final publication of the Çamaltı Burnu I excavations. They include plain and decorated glazed plates and jugs; cups and mugs; cooking pots and miscellaneous kitchen ware. The amphoras that formed the cargo and the decorated table wares are of recognizable Byzantine origin. They provide the dating evidence of early thirteenth century for Çamaltı Burnu I. After three earlier study seasons, this fellowship supports the final writing up of the ceramics as Dr. Armstrong’s contribution to the complete publication of the wreck and its excavation.

Dr. Brami received his PhD from the University of Liverpool in 2014. As an ANAMED fellow he is revisiting on the 'Pompeii premise' in archaeology, the false assumption, often implicit in the literature, that the archaeological record is a snapshot of a once-living community, 'frozen' at a specific point in time. As M. Schiffer and others have demonstrated, this is very unlikely to be the case, even at sites which have fallen victim to a catastrophe, such as Pompeii. For instance, Pompeiians have been found to have retrieved some of their valuables before losing their homes to the volcano. The challenge confronting archaeologists thence is how to infer everyday life and past human behaviours based on a 'distorted' archaeological record. Yet a range of techniques used at Barçın Höyük and other Neolithic sites in Anatolia, for instance micro-stratigraphy and analysis of the spatial distribution of micro-artefacts, has become available to identify activities in space. The focus of this collaboration with R. Özbal and the Barçın Höyük team will be to revisit the 'Pompeii premise' in light of these results. Do these techniques provide enough of an insight to reconstruct activity areas and finally move beyond the Pompeii premise?

Dr. Jones is Associate Professor of Art History at Florida Statue University, and obtained her Ph.D. from the University of Illinois in 1995. As an ANAMED fellow she is conducting research for, and writing a key chapter of her book in progress, “The Cult of the Emperor in Middle Byzantine Art” (contracted with Routledge). Her particular focus will be the documentation and analysis of the visual expression of a cult dedicated to Constantine the Great in the middle Byzantine period (843–1204). She places this devotional practice, and the development of specific iconography associated with it, in the context of the rise of ‘new saints’ venerated in popular, often short-lived, and often non-Constantinopolitan, cults. Key to her argument is the vestibule mosaic in Hagia Sophia, for which she present a new analysis.

Gilbert Dagron’s seminal work clearly lays out the idealized ‘priest and emperor’ model of Byzantine rulership, and demonstrates the degrees to which it was achieved, maintained, altered, and made manifest in ceremonial and law. Dr. Jones’ work seeks to further this discussion, looking to the visual expression of imperial cults in middle Byzantine art. She suggests, in the vestibule mosaic, we see a reaction to the rise of a popular cult of Constantine, one that promotes Constantine’s role as historical empire-builder and visually suppresses his saintliness.

Colors on maps may convey different meanings as signifiers, as in the case of portolan charts, which provide us with visual elements of the trade network of the Mediterranean in the Middle Ages. Leaving debates about origins aside, portolan charts provide us valuable graphic data on how the geography of the period was perceived by society, especially by those who were dealing with overseas trade. In keeping with this theme, this research aims to take the ports written in red on portolan charts as starting points to draw a wider picture of the geography in question from the commercial point of view, comparing those ports with ones mentioned in notarial acts of the notaries from the Italian Maritime Republics active between the early 12th and late 14th centuries. Moreover the research will be completed with an attempt to correlate examples of material culture of the period (if there is any) found in excavations with data from both notarial acts and portolan charts.

Dr. Kahyaoğlu is a specialist in Byzantine art and received his PhD from Ege University’s Institute of Social sciences in 2010. One of the expected outcomes of his research at ANAMED will be the re-organization of data already collected and the deepening of research to be published as a book.

The Aşıklı Höyük Research Project is one of the two ongoing projects in Central Anatolia that focuses on the earliest stages of one of the significant changes in the lifeways of humans, the Neolithic. The site presents the transitional stage to sedentary life and changes in the socio-economic system of a community over almost a thousand years between 8400–7300 calBC. Earlier fieldwork and research until 2004, directed by Prof. U. Esin (Istanbul University), were carried out mainly on the later phases of the settlement, the 8th millennium BC. The results were published in various periodicals and as book chapters. The second phase of the fieldwork and research, started in 2006, has focused mainly on the earlier phases, the mid-9th millennium BC. The initial results of the latter carried out over the last ten years are ready to be published as a monograph.

The goal of Dr. Özbaşaran's Short-term Fellowship is to edit and finalize the monograph mentioned above. It includes detailed studies of site-formation processes, radiocarbon dating, human-animal and human-plant interactions, changes in settlement pattern and architectural designs, sediment micromorphology, and phytolith assemblages. This publication will be a comprehensive resource in understanding and interpreting the lifeways of this transitional community and will contribute to long-term debates on the neolithization process on a regional scale neolithization process on a regional scale.

Vasileios Syros is currently a Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences/KNAW Visiting Professor at Radboud University Nijmegen and the Principal Investigator for the research program “Political Power in the European and Islamic Worlds” at the Academy of Finland. His academic interests lie in the study of medieval and early modern Christian/Latin, Jewish, and Islamic political thought. Syros has published Marsilius of Padua at the Intersection of Ancient and Medieval Cultures and Traditions of Learning (University of Toronto Press, 2012); Die Rezeption der aristotelischen politischen Philosophie bei Marsilius von Padua (Brill, 2007); and Well Begun is Only Half Done: Tracing Aristotle’s Political Ideas in Medieval Arabic, Syriac, Byzantine, and Jewish Sources (ACMRS, 2011). His work has appeared in a number of international peer-reviewed journals, including Viator, Journal of Early Modern History, Medieval Encounters, Journal of World History, Philosophy East & West, History of Political Thought, Republics of Letters, and Revue des Études Juives. He has taught previously at Stanford University, McGill University, The University of Chicago, and the École Pratique des Hautes Études (Paris). Syros has held research fellowships at Columbia University, the University of Pennsylvania, Princeton University, the University of Michigan, and the Royal Society of Edinburgh.

Dr. Peirce is an historian of the early modern Ottoman empire who obtained her PhD degree from Princeton University in 1988. Her ANAMED project, a book entitled Captivity among the Ottomans, explores what she calls “a spectrum of unfreedom.” In addition to legal forms of slavery, it studies “hidden captives,” the invisible victims of seizure by raiders, bandits, and abductors. Slavery has been less well studied for the 16th and 17th centuries in comparison to later periods. Because the sources of the period attest the frequency of freeing slaves, the intermediate category of freedpersons also figures in the project.

Dr Shukurov’s current research project attempts to problematize and analyze the nature of the permeability of borders between Byzantine Christian and Anatolian Muslim cultural spaces. His hypothesis is that the significant physical and culturally active presence of Christians (both Orthodox and Heterodox) in Muslim Anatolia constituted a firm common ground for heterogeneous Anatolian cultural space. The presence and role of Christians in Muslim cultural space is analyzed in particular by means of a prosopographic study based on all available Greek, Persian, Arabic, and Armenian textual sources of the time. Christians in Muslim Asia Minor made an outstanding impact on the Muslim element proper: on local textual production (narrative, documentary, scientific, and literary), Muslim book production, and Anatolian art and architecture.

Dr. Türker is conducting two research projects while a Short-Term Fellow at ANAMED. The first one is the completion of a book manuscript on the Yıldız Palace, the last imperial residence, with the working title “Ottoman Victoriana: Nineteenth-Century Sultans and the Making of a Palace, 1795–1909.” The manuscript reconstructs the architectural history of the now physically fragmented site by weaving in understudied archives, court chronicles, and photographs. These materials highlight the site’s pre-palatine history, where female patrons of the Tanzimat era were its primary owners and created the stage over which Abdülhamid II later built his citadel-like palatine city at the turn of the century. Through the Yıldız Palace, the manuscript examines the nineteenth-century landscape histories of other Ottoman estates as well as the radically altered imperial institution of the gardeners’ corps. It also approaches the emerging taste in homemaking, in emerging domestic typologies, in light of the less-than monumental architectural choices that the nineteenth-century sultans made for their residences, architectural specimens of the world’s fairs, and the global circulation of prefabricated structures.

Dr. Türker’s second project is to complete an essay (to be published in a Brill anthology on Muslim collectors in the nineteenth century) on the numismatic interest and coin collection of Abdüllatif Suphi Paşa, a Tanzimat heavy-hitter, who served the state interchangeably as the Minister of Education, Endowments, and Finance. His extensive coin collection, now largely in the British Museum, was a source of scholarly exchanges between European and Ottoman historians and collectors. Suphi’s still extant residence housed assemblies to discuss history through artifacts. The essay that she would like to complete on him casts him as a scholar-bureaucrat that, alongside Ahmed Vefik Paşa (and his sizable library), helped shape collecting habits in the empire to aid in history-writing and museum-building.