We are delighted to announce our very first NECRO-IST workshop! Here are the details of the workshop:
NECRO–IST WORKSHOP
CEMETERY AS ARCHIVE
INTERDISCIPLINARY & APPLIED PERSPECTIVES ON NECROGEOGRAPHIES OF ISTANBUL
Saturday December 13th, 2025
Sabancı University
Karaköy Minerva Han Communication Center
Minerva Palas, Bankalar Caddesi No:2, Karaköy, 34420 İstanbul
Cashier’s Lounge
Deadline for submissions: 4 December 2025
WORKSHOP PROGRAM
9:30 – 10:00 Registration & Coffee
10:00 – 10:15 Welcoming Remarks
10:15 – 12:15 Methodological Discussions & Approaches to Istanbul’s Necrogeographies
Nükhet Varlık “Cemeteries as Necropolitical and Necrogeograpical Sources”
İkbal Sezen Polat “Cemeteries as Topographical Archives: Istanbul’s Land Walls”
Wilhelmine Coste “Cemeteries and Archival Theory”
12:15 – 2:15 Lunch Break
14:15 – 18:00 Applied workshop
NECRO-IST: Necrogeographies of Istanbul is an interdisciplinary research and public history initiative dedicated to mapping out surviving and lost graveyards of Istanbul, identifying the individuals buried therein, researching their stories, and generating publicly accessible information about them. We invite applications for our first public workshop, organized in collaboration with Sabancı University and Rutgers University-Newark, to be held on December 13, 2025 at Sabancı University’s Minerva Han Communication Center in Istanbul. The purpose of the workshop is to showcase new and ongoing research, address emerging questions on methodology and sources, and collectively seek new perspectives for studying the necrogeographies of Istanbul and beyond.
CALL FOR PAPERS
CEMETERIES AS ARCHIVES: INTERDISCIPLINARY & APPLIED PERSPECTIVES ON NECROGEOGRAPHIES OF ISTANBUL
Cemeteries are more than a designated resting space for the dead. They are layered repositories of memory, identity, mobility, and landscape. We seek to understand cemetery in its broadest sense, that is, not only as surviving and officially preserved burial grounds, but also as displaced, fragmented, destroyed, repurposed or even as entirely vanished mortuary sites. Cemeteries can endure in traces, in oral memory, as archival fragments, archeological layers, skeletal remains or molecular data. What does it mean to treat necrogeographies, burial grounds, and human and material remains as archives? How do cemeteries keep, transmit, and transform knowledge across time and space? What are the various methodological, historical, ethical, and theoretical tools that are required to examine these sites as archives?
At a moment when the archive is being reimagined across the humanities and social sciences, natural sciences, and design disciplines, cemeteries invite us to reconsider what constitutes evidence beyond institutional holdings. At the intersection of cultural studies, death studies, memory studies, and critical heritage research, cemeteries emerge as sites that now demand to be explored from interdisciplinary and applied perspectives. We thus invite scholars, artists, and practitioners to examine cemeteries, burial grounds, and mortuary landscapes as archives.
We especially encourage research in progress as well as experimental and interdisciplinary contributions that test new methodologies, revisit known materials or present preliminary findings. The workshop will be discussion-based, emphasizing collective reflection over polished results.
Proposals may address, but are not limited to:
– Archaeology and archeothanatology, as modes of archival interpretation
– Human remains as archives of lived experience, disease, ancestry, movement, care, and violence
– Bioarcheology and archaeogenetics, where molecular data serve as historical record
– Lost, relocated or desecrated cemeteries, and methodologies required to reconstruct them
– Cemeteries as ecological, topographic, and memory landscapes
– Gravestones and epitaphs as biographical and literary archives
Possible Themes:
– Burial topographies & urban memory
– Demographic & social histories
– Architectural landscape & art historical approaches
– Material culture, epigraphy & the use of symbols
– Cultural studies & death studies
– Ritual, mourning & affective archives
– Forensic, osteological & archaeogenetic archives
– Digital mapping, data visualization & virtual reconstruction
– Power, sovereignty & governance of the dead and cemeteries
We welcome submissions from historians, anthropologists, archaeologists, art and architectural historians, architects, urbanists, designers, digital mappers, geographers, sociologists, archivists, bioarcheologists, archaeogeneticists, and artists working on topics related to death, memory, landscape, and cultural heritage.
Submission Guidelines
Please submit an abstract of approximately 300 words, along with a short biographical note (100–150 words) including your affiliation (if any) and contact information.
Presentations may be delivered in English or Turkish.
Please send submissions in a single PDF file to: necroist@outlook.com
Deadline for submissions: 4 December 2025
Place: Minerva Han, Sabancı University. Minerva Palas, Bankalar Caddesi No:2, Karaköy, 34420 Istanbul
For more information about NECRO-IST Project see our website and instagram page:
https://sites.rutgers.edu/necro-ist/
https://www.instagram.com/necro_ist/
Workshop Organizers:
Nükhet Varlık, Rutgers University-Newark
Akarsu Melike Demirkol, Boğaziçi University
Batuğhan Tatar, Rutgers University-Newark
İkbal Sezen Polat, Middle East Technical University
Meyçem Ceren Ulu, Freie Universität Berlin
Tarkan Görücü, Middle East Technical University
