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 that she co-edited. (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 from the UK, the US, Turkey, 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 Ottoman and 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. Most recently, Professor Turan-Özkaya was the co-chair of the 2021 EAHN Thematic Conference "Architecture and Endurance" and co-organizer of the BIAA workshop “Ottoman Cultural Mobilities: 19th-century of Modes of Travel, Collecting and Display.”  

1989 - 1995

Doctorate

Cornell University, Mimarlık Tarihi , United States Of America

1984 - 1988

Postgraduate

Middle East Technical University, Graduate School of Natural and Applied Sciences, Restorasyon (Yl) (Tezli), Turkey

1980 - 1984

Undergraduate

Middle East Technical University, Faculty of Architecture, Department of Architecture, Turkey