[Distinguished Speaker Series] Ömür Harmanşah: Fieldwork and Creativity in the Landscapes of the Anthropocene: Archaeology, Politics, and Cultural Heritage in The Middle East

Ömür Harmanşah: Fieldwork and Creativity in the Landscapes of the Anthropocene: Archaeology, Politics, and Cultural Heritage in The Middle East

Wednesday, November 29, 2023 // 4:00 PM EST

Zimmerli Art Museum (MPR) // 71 Hamilton St, New Brunswick, NJ 08901

Zoom Registration: https://rutgers.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJArcO2hrDgpGt2bXRlXxBfSUBC0rPImMVWx

Ecological crises and global climate change have become matters of everyday concern for communities around the world. We live in an era of precarity and ecological anxiety that threatens landscapes and monuments of cultural heritage. What does it mean to practice fieldwork in such a tense present and what kinds of unexpected collaborations and new sensitivities are required to study landscapes, monuments, and their communities in the Anthropocene? In what ways can humanities contribute to debates on climate change? In this paper, Professor Ömür Harmanşah presents the concepts of landscape and fieldwork as sites of creativity in thinking toward a resilient and politically engaged practice that engages with architectural heritage.

Ömür Harmanşah is Director of the School of Art & Art History and Associate Professor of Art History at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He is an architectural historian and landscape archaeologist and his research and teaching focuses on the art, architecture, and material culture of ancient Western Asia. His more recent research is in environmental humanities, addressing political ecology and cultural heritage in the Anthropocene. He is the author of Cities and the Shaping of Memory in the Ancient Near East (Cambridge, 2013), and Place, Memory, and Healing: An Archaeology of Anatolian Rock Monuments (Routledge, 2015). He is also a co-author in Thames & Hudson’s new global art history textbook The History of Art: A Global View (2021). For fieldwork, he has been directing Yalburt Yaylası Archaeological Landscape Research Project, an archaeological survey in Turkey’s Konya province since 2010. He was also the Lead-PI for “Political Ecology as Practice: A Regional Approach to the Anthropocene” (2017-2019), funded by the Humanities Without Walls Consortium with a grant from the Andrew Mellon Foundation. His current book project is titled Landscapes of the Anthropocene: Archaeology, Fieldwork, and the Politics of Heritage in the Middle East (under contract with Routledge).