Full-Time Faculty
Prof. Dr. T. Elvan ALTAN (B.Arch., M.A., METU; Ph.D., SUNY at Binghamton)
19th and 20th Century Architecture, Modern Architecture, Architecture in late Ottoman Empire and Republican Turkey, Social Production of the Built Environment, Architectural Historiography
Prof. Dr. Lale ÖZGENEL (B.Arch., M.A., METU; Ph.D., METU)
Ancient Domestic Architecture and Daily Life, History of Domestic Architecture, Gender and Privacy Studies, Rural Architecture, History of Tennis and Tennis Clubs in Turkey, Educational Architecture
Prof. Dr. Ali Uzay PEKER (B.A., Istanbul University; M.A., Boğaziçi University; Ph.D., Istanbul Technical University)
Early Islamic, Seljuk and Ottoman Architecture, Occidentalism and Orientalism in Architecture, Thirteenth Century Anatolia, Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (Baroque and Rococo), Exoticism, Iconography and Symbolism in Islamic and Christian Architecture, Cosmology (ancient and medieval), Ottoman Archaeology
(personal web-page: http://www.metu.edu.tr/~peker/)
Assist. Prof. Dr. Ekin PİNAR (B. Arch., M.A., METU; Ph.D., University of Pennsylvania)
Ekin Pınar received her Ph.D. from the History of Art department at the University of Pennsylvania. Her areas of interest include history of art and architecture (modern and contemporary), cinema studies, history and theory of animation, history of experimental film and visual culture, expanded cinema, site-specific art, museum studies, institutional critique, and gender and sexuality studies. She has taught several courses on history and theory of film, animation, and modern and contemporary art and architecture at the History of Art department and Cinema Studies program at the University of Pennsylvania, at Middle East Technical University, as well as at the Department of Theatre, Dance, and Film at the Franklin and Marshall College. She is currently working on a book project on Canyon Collective, an experimental film group active in the San Francisco Bay Area in the sixties and seventies, and the ways in which their film production embodied a protean and transnational concept of space.
History of Modern and Contemporary Art and Architecture; Cinema Studies; Site-Specific Art; Museum Studies and Institutional Critique; Expanded Cinema and Moving Image Exhibition Practices and Spaces; Audio-Visual Essay and Historiography; Narrative Space; Sense of Place in Cinema; History and Theory of Animation; Global Turn, Race, and Art and Architectural Histories; Gender and Sexuality Studies
Prof. Dr. Belgin TURAN ÖZKAYA (B.Arch., M.Sc. in Restoration, METU; Ph.D., Cornell University)
Trained as a modernist at Cornell University (Ph.D., 1995), Professor Turan-Özkaya’s current work tackles intertwined histories of nineteenth and twentieth-century architectures. Her earlier publications on twentieth-century Italian architecture include essays in JAE, Harvard Design Magazine, Biographies and Space: Placing the Subject in Art and Architecture and Rethinking Architectural Historiography (Routledge, 2006, long listed for the RIBA Sir Nikolaus Pevsner International Book Award). In 2009, she co-initiated a British Academy project "Ambivalent Geographies" to probe nineteenth and twentieth-century architecture and culture in West Asia within the framework of Ottoman British interactions. As a group of scholars not only from the UK, US and Turkey but also from Saudi Arabia, Israel, Jordan and Egypt, they organized workshops in Ankara, Southampton, and Riverside, California. Among their publications are “Modern Architecture in the Middle East: Beyond Tradition and Development,” (DOCOMOMO Journal, 2006), “Transpositions on the Edge of Europe: Ambivalence and Difference in Architecture,” (Journal of Architecture, 2011), and “Ambivalent Architectures from the Ottoman Empire to the Turkish Republic,” (New Perspectives on Turkey, 2014). As part of “Ambivalent Geographies” project she started working on a book, Itinerant Objects: British Museum and the Ottoman Response to Antiquity, in which she traces the intertwined histories of three groups of objects from the British Museum: the Xanthian, Canning and Assyrian marbles that were collected and transported from Lycia, Halicarnassus and Mesopotamia, all Ottoman territories back then, to the British Museum by British envoys and early archaeologists in the mid-nineteenth century. Itinerant Objects is a project of connected histories that covers both the Ottoman and the British cultures of collecting and display. Professor Turan-Özkaya, who has received fellowships and grants from the Canadian Centre for Architecture, Koç University ANAMED and the Getty Research Institute, has also edited “Spaces of Vision: Architecture and Visuality in the Modern Era,” (Architectural Theory Review, 2007), and a special collection on “Travel,” (Architectural Histories, Journal of the EAHN, 2016). During 2017- 2018 academic year she was an AKPIA Associate at Harvard University’s Department of History of Art and Architecture.
Modernism/Nineteenth and Twentieth-Century Architecture, Nineteenth-Century Culture of Travel, Collecting and Display, Twentieth-Century Italian Architecture, Theories of Vision and Visuality, Gender Theory, Historiography
belt@metu.edu.tr Belgin TURAN ÖZKAYA CV
Assist. Prof. Dr. Pelin YONCACI ARSLAN (B.Arch., M.A., METU; Ph.D., University of California Los Angeles)
Pelin Yoncacı-Arslan is an architect and an architectural historian specializing in historical topography of Late Antique and Byzantine cities; urban history and education; digital technologies, 3D visualization and mapping tools applied in architectural historywriting. Yoncacı-Arslan earned her PhD degree in Architecture and Urban Design from UCLA, the University of California Los Angeles (2015). Her publications include articles on the urban and processional landscape of Early Byzantine Constantinople, disciplinary boundaries of architectural history education, and the dynamic interface between digital humanities (DH) and architectural history. As a fellow researcher at UCLA Experiential Technologies Center, she participated in several DH projects, among others, “Visualizing Statues in the Late Antique Roman Forum” and “Magnesia Archaeological Site Survey and 3D Visualization Project.” She has taught several courses on the history of architecture; urban processions in history; digital humanities and architectural history; and contemporary architecture at Middle East Technical University. She has also been involved in curating and writing for DH projects and exhibitions, including curating the exhibition “On the Same Page: 30 Years of METU Architectural History” in 2019. As a practicing architect, she received design awards, among others, the 1st price in Haliç (Region 1) Waterfront Urban Design Competition in 2020. She is currently working on a visualization project on the historical topography of Haliç (Golden Horn) area from Byzantine to Ottoman times and investigates the ways in which this unique urban edge shaped the commercial front of the city.
Byzantine Urban Landscape, Early Byzantine Urbanism, Historical Topography of Constantinople, Columnar Monuments of Pre-modern era, Mapping and Network Analysis in the field of Digital Humanities, 3D Digital Reconstructions of Historical Sites, Multimedia Maps populated with spatial narratives
Part-Time Faculty
Nahide Işık DEMİRAKIN (BSc. ODTÜ; M.A., Ph.D., Bilkent University)
Urban History, Historiography, Cultural History, 19th Century Ottoman Empire, Modernization
Suna GÜVEN (B.A., Wellesley College; M.A., Ph.D., Cornell University)
Roman and Byzantine Architecture, Latin Architecture in Cyprus, Memory, Acculturation, Imaging
Jale ERZEN (B.F.A., M.F.A., Art Center College of Design L.A.; Ph.D., ITÜ)
Ottoman Aesthetics, Ottoman Miniatures, Ottoman Architecture of the 15th-16th Centuries; Modern Art, Turkish Art General, Art Criticism; Aesthetics; Environmental Aesthetics
Gizem TONGO (B.A., Boğaziçi University; M.A. Manchester University & Boğaziçi University; Ph.D., Oxford University)
Ottoman History, Post-1900 Literatures, Theories and Cultures, Gender Studies