Harmanşah, Ömür

University of Illinois at Chicago

Research Topic: Political Ecology of Water in the Hittite Borderlands: The Landscapes of the Holocene and the Anthropocene

Dr. Harmanşah is Associate Professor of Art History at the University of Illinois at Chicago. His current research focuses on the history of landscapes in the Middle East and the politics of ecology, place, and heritage in the age of the Anthropocene. As an archaeologist and an architectural historian of the ancient Near East, Harmanşah specializes in the art, architecture, and material culture of Anatolia, Syria, and Mesopotamia during the Bronze and Iron Ages. His earlier research focused on cities, the production of architectural and urban space, critical studies of place and landscape, building technologies and architectural knowledge, and image-making practices in urban and rural environments. He is the author of two monographs, Cities and the Shaping of Memory in the Ancient Near East, (Cambridge University Press, 2013), and Place, Memory, and Healing: An Archaeology of Anatolian Rock Monuments (Routledge, 2015). He is currently the Principal Investigator for a collaborative project entitled “Political Ecology as Practice: A Regional Approach to the Anthropocene” supported by the Humanities Without Walls consortium. Since 2010, Harmanşah has been directing the Yalburt Yaylası Archaeological Landscape Research Project, a diachronic regional survey project addressing questions of place and landscape in Konya Province of west-central Türkiye. His current writing project at ANAMED is titled “Political Ecology of Water in the Hittite Borderlands: The Landscapes of the Holocene and the Anthropocene,” a monograph co-authored with Peri Johnson and other members of the Yalburt Survey Project.