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BA, Boğaziçi University; MA, Freie Universität Berlin; MA, MPhil, PhD, Columbia University
I am an art historian and curator specializing in the arts of Ancient Western Asia, particularly Mesopotamian and Anatolian art from the third to the first millennium BCE. I come to the University of York from The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, where I took part in the renovation and reimagining of the permanent galleries of the Department of Ancient Near Eastern Art. Between 2018–2022, I was employed at The Morgan Library and Museum in New York, where I co-curated the international loan exhibition “She Who Wrote: Enheduanna and Women of Mesopotamia (3400-2000 BCE).”
My work has been published in Res: Anthropology and Aesthetics, Forum Kritische Archäologie, The Journal of the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Foundation, and supported by grants and fellowships from the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts (CASVA) of the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C., The Mellon Foundation, The Sakıp Sabancı Center for Turkish Studies, and the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD).
Overview
My research has centred upon foregrounding underrepresented themes, sources, periods, and geographies, complemented by material, formal, iconographical, and contextual analyses of artworks. My current book project, Site-Worlds: Art, Politics, and Time In and Beyond Tello (Ancient Girsu), brings the art history of a paradigmatic archaeological site named Tello in modern-day Iraq from the third millennium BCE into the present by stressing the entanglement of multiple temporal frames spanning the artworks’ production, use, excavation, transportation, and exhibition. This project engages with critical and decolonial perspectives by not relying solely on western accounts about the “discovery” of this site, and integrates for the first time a wide range of local sources across time—from Sumerian inscriptions to Hellenistic sources; from Medieval Arabic texts to the nineteenth-century Ottoman archives. I demonstrate that this site was considered a place of memory and history for millennia, and counter the prevailing view that such sites were “discovered” in a terra incognita only after the arrival of the European and American excavators in the nineteenth century.
My work has also aimed to question and recalibrate art historical theories and methodologies that are often taken to be neutral and universal. For example, refuting the empirical basis for ethnic classifications of Syro-Anatolian orthostat reliefs (c. 1200–700 BCE), I redefined the concepts of “style” and “ethnicity,” and constructed an alternative categorization deriving from a re-evaluation of both ancient contexts and modern disciplinary histories. I also worked on the history of the disciplines of art history and archaeology, and investigated the longstanding impact of the concepts of immanence and stylistic influence in the field—with particular attention to the works of Meyer Schapiro and Hans Sedlmayr. In addition to my book project, I am currently undertaking several writing projects, ranging from exhibition settings in the Ottoman Imperial Museum to the work of the artist Burhan Doğançay; from the text-image dialectic in Sumerian art to the history of Mesopotamian archaeology from the eyes of an Ottoman government representative named Bedri Bey.
Since 2018, I have been active in the museum field and worked on the permanent collections of Ancient Western Asian art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Morgan Library and Museum in New York. At the latter institution, I co-curated with Sidney Babcock an international loan exhibition titled She Who Wrote: Enheduanna and Women of Mesopotamia, 3400-2000 BC (14 October 2022–19 February 2023).
Research Projects
In terms of fieldwork, I have attended archaeological excavations in Turkey, and been part of the international team for the Mapping Mesopotamian Monuments Project sponsored by Columbia University and directed by Professor Zainab Bahrani. This is an on-site documentation effort in Iraq and Turkey which seeks to counter the looting and destruction of the past, and the related dissociation of people from their diverse cultural histories.
Supervision
Dr Tamur welcomes enquiries from potential doctoral candidates wishing to undertake advanced research in the fields of Ancient Western Asian art and museum studies.
Books
Peer-Reviewed Journal Articles
Peer-Reviewed Book Contributions and Catalogue Essays
Editor-Reviewed Articles
Encyclopedic Entries
Reviews
Popular Articles (selected)
Undergraduate
Postgraduate
Talks and Conference Presentations