Date: 27 October 2022
Time: 18:30 (Turkey local time, GMT +3)

For this month’s talk, ANAMED will feature former ANAMED fellow Pınar Aykaç. Moderated by former ANAMED fellow Belgin Turan Özkaya, their talk will address Sultanahmet, Istanbul’s Historic Peninsula: Musealization and Urban Conservation that explores how the museum concept has expanded beyond the boundaries of a single building into the historic city itself through musealization. Articulating the musealization of historic cities as a specific urban process, this book presents a study of the transformation of the Sultanahmet district on Istanbul’s historic peninsula, which has been the major focus of planning, conservation, and museological studies in Turkey since the nineteenth century as the public face of the city. The author offers empirically grounded and context-specific insight into the role of museums in the regeneration of historic cities. Musealization as an urban process varies in different geographical, cultural, and ideological contexts, and across different time periods. By discussing the Sultanahmet district as a specific context of yet another city subjected to the musealization process, this book provides further insights into this important global phenomenon.

This online talk will be held in English. Please register this event in advance from here.

Pınar Aykaç is an assistant professor at the Middle East Technical University’s Department of Architecture in Ankara, Turkey. She received a MSc in the Conservation of Cultural Heritage from the Middle East Technical University, and a PhD from UCL, the Bartlett School of Architecture. She was a Weinberg Fellow at Columbia University’s Italian Academy for Advanced Studies in America during the fall semester of 2017-2018. She is the author of Sultanahmet, Istanbul’s Historic Peninsula: Musealization and Urban Conservation (Lexington Books, 2022) and the co-editor of Architectures of Emergency in Turkey: Heritage, Displacement and Catastrophe (I.B. Tauris, 2021) together with Eray Çaylı and Sevcan Ercan.

Belgin Turan Özkaya (PhD Cornell University) is Professor of Architectural History in the Department of Architecture at Middle East Technical University. She is interested in connected histories of the long nineteenth century and the cultures and spaces of collecting and mobility. Among her publications are, Rethinking Architectural Historiography (Routledge, 2006), and the collections, “Transpositions on the Edge of Europe: Ambivalence and Difference in Architecture” (Journal of Architecture, 2011), “Ambivalent Architectures from the Ottoman Empire to the Turkish Republic” (New Perspectives on Turkey, 2014), and “Travel” (Architectural Histories, 2016). She was the codirector of the British Academy project, “Ambivalent Geographies,” which led to her current work on the monograph, Itinerant Objects: British Museum and the Ottoman Response to Antiquity, and the coedited volume, Ottoman Cultural Mobilities: 19th -Century Modes of Travel, Collecting and Display. Most recently, she was the co-organizer of the 2021 EAHN Thematic Conference “Architecture and Endurance.”