Lecturer
(Visiting Faculty Fall 2011, Spring 2012, Fall 2015)
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Biography Sibel Bozdogan holds a professional degree in architecture from Middle East Technical University, Ankara, Turkey (1976) and a PhD from the University of Pennsylvania (1983). She has taught architectural history and theory courses at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (1986 – 1991), MIT (1991 – 1999) and the GSD, Harvard University (part-time since 2000). She has also served as the Director of Liberal Studies at the Boston Architectural Center (2004 – 2006) and currently teaches in the new Graduate Architecture Program of Bilgi University in Spring semesters. She works on trans-national histories of modern architecture and urbanism in Europe, the U.S., Mediterranean, and the Middle East, with a specific focus on Turkey. She has published articles internationally, has co-authored a monograph on the Turkish architect Sedad Hakki Eldem (1987), and co-edited an interdisciplinary volume, Rethinking Modernity and National Identity in Turkey (1997). Her Modernism and Nation Building: Turkish Architectural Culture in the Early Republic (University of Washington Press, 2001) has won the 2002 Alice Davis Hitchcock Award of the Society of Architectural Historians and the Koprulu Book Prize of the Turkish Studies Association. She was one of the curators of the “Istanbul 1910-2010: City, Built Environment and Architectural Culture” exhibition in Istanbul Bilgi University in Fall 2010 and has recently completed Turkey: Modern Architectures in History, co-authored by Esra Akcan for Reaktion Books (2012). |
Fall 2015 courses
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4.621 Orientalism & Representation Seminar on the historiography and politics of representation with special focus on Orientalist traditions in architecture, art, literature, and scholarship. Critically analyzes pivotal texts, projects, and images that informed the cross-cultural encounters between the West and the Orient from Antiquity to the present. Discusses how political and ideological attitudes and religious beliefs informed both the construction and reproduction of Western knowledge about the Islamic world as well as the revisionist Oriental self-representations. Research paper required. |
Spring 2012 courses
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4.611 / 4.613 Civic Architecture in Islamic History – Istanbul: From Imperial Capital to Global City Seminar on the historiography and politics of representation with special focus on Orientalist traditions in architecture, art, literature, and scholarship. Critically analyzes pivotal texts, projects, and images that informed the cross-cultural encounters between Europe and the “Orient” from Antiquity to the present. Discusses how political and ideological attitudes and religious beliefs informed both the construction and reproduction of Western knowledge about the Islamic world as well as the revisionist “Oriental” self-representations. Research paper required. |
| 4.616 Selected Topics on Culture and Architecture – Global Perspectives on Modern Architecture The inherited Eurocentric biases of the historiography of modern architecture have more recently been dismantled in favor of recognizing the plurality, heterogeneity and difference of modern architectures across the globe. Recent critical theories and revisionist histories have articulated the need to abandon the very idea of a central, singular and canonic modernism or “a European master narrative” claiming distinction from what was perceived to be its lesser, derivative extensions in peripheral geographies (“non-western”, “Third World” or “other” modernisms to cite some of the terms in circulation). What is proposed instead is a “cosmopolitan modernism” –one that is de-centered, worldwide and heterogeneous; a global history that explores the circulation, translation and domestication of architectural/urban ideas and forms not just between the industrialized west and the countries typically grouped under the term “Third World”, but among different “Third World” countries themselves. This seminar seeks to review the growing body of recent scholarship paradigmatic of such trans-national perspectives in the history of modern architecture –not only studies of individual countries like Turkey, Japan, China, India, Iran, Brazil, Mexico and Indonesia (such as Bozdogan, 2001; Akcan, 2012; Oshima, 2009; Kuan, 2002; Lu, 2005; Prakash, 2002; Grigor, 2009; Deckker, 2001; Carranza, 2010; and Kusno, 2000 and 2010) but also broader and comparative regional studies (such as Duanfang Lu ed., Third World Modernism: Architecture, Development and Identity, 2010; Mark Crinson, Modern Architecture and the End of Empire, 2003; J.F. Lejeune, Michelangelo Sabatino, eds. Modern Architecture and the Mediterranean, 2010; and Sandy Isenstadt and Kishwar Rizvi eds. Modern Architecture and the Middle East , 2008, as well as special issues of Docomomo Journal on Caribbean, Middle East and Africa). Through these selected works, the seminar will explore the role of architecture in the making (and continuous re-negotiation) of modern national identities of countries outside Europe and North America, from their colonial/imperial beginnings in the 19th century to the building of post-colonial/ post-imperial nation states in the 20th century and the more recent effects of globalization and neo-liberal economic integration in the 21st. Through weekly discussion of selected texts and contexts, we will focus on how imported discourses of modern architecture and urbanism are contested, selectively appropriated and transformed in peripheral geographies, reflecting the complex internal dynamics and the specific national projects of these countries. The overall objective of the seminar is to critically map the field, identify theoretical and methodological issues common to such trans-national studies of modernism and discuss the ways in which they open up, contribute to or transform the history, theory and criticism of modern architecture. Seminar participants will be required to make class presentations on selected topics/texts/countries and submit a major research paper at the end of the semester. |
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Fall 2011 course
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4.621 Orientalism and Representation |