Ömür Harmansah

University of Illinois at Chicago, Art and Art History, Director, School of Art & Art History

University of Illinois at Chicago, Art History, Faculty Member

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Ömür Harmansah is the Director of the School of Art & Art Art History at the University of Illinois-Chicago, and at the same time Associate Professor of Art History in the Department of Art History. Ömür Harmansah’s current research focuses on the history of landscapes in the Middle East and the politics of ecology, place, and heritage in the age of the Anthropocene. As an archaeologist and an architectural historian of the ancient Near East, Harmansah specializes in the art, architecture, and material culture of Anatolia, Syria, and Mesopotamia during the Bronze and Iron Ages. Harmansah's earlier research focused on cities, the production of architectural and urban space, critical studies of place and landscape, building technologies and architectural knowledge, and image-making practices in the urban and rural environments. Harmansah is the author of two monographs, Cities and the Shaping of Memory in the Ancient Near East, (Cambridge University Press, 2013), and Place, Memory, and Healing: An Archaeology of Anatolian Rock Monuments (Routledge, 2015). He also edited the volume Of Rocks and Water: Towards an Archaeology of Place, published by Oxbow Books (2014). The monograph Cities and the Shaping of Memory in the Ancient Near East has been translated to Turkish and published by Koc University Press in 2015. Since 2010, Harmansah has been directing Yalburt Yaylasi Archaeological Landscape Research Project, a diachronic regional survey project addressing questions of place and landscape in Konya Province of west-central Turkey. Harmansah is currently working on a new monograph on landscape history and political ecology in the Middle East, addressing the challenges brought about by the new geological epoch Anthropocene, climate change, and environmental crisis on landscape archaeology, cultural heritage, and archaeological field practice. This monograph will bring together insights from current debates in new materialism and political ecology to discuss the precarity of archaeological landscapes and cultural heritage under the impact of late capitalism. He is the Principal Investigator for the 3-year multi-institutional collaborative project entitled “Political Ecology as Practice: A Regional Approach to the Anthropocene”. This project is supported by the Humanities Without Walls consortium, based at the Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The Humanities Without Walls consortium is funded by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.Born and raised in Turkey, Ömür studied architecture and architectural history at the Middle East Technical University (Ankara, Turkey), and received his PhD from University of Pennsylvania in the History of Art (2005). He previously taught at Reed College (Portland, OR) and Brown University (Providence, RI) before joining the faculty at UIC’s School of Art and Art History in 2014. He received various sabbatical and research awards, including Koç University’s Research Center for Anatolian Civilizations Senior Fellowship (2009-2010), Brown University’s Cogut Center for the Humanities Faculty Fellowship (Fall 2012), and University of Texas at Austin’s Donald D. Harrington Faculty Research Fellowship(2013-2014). Recently, he has been elected as a “Rising Star” in Art, Architecture, and the Humanities among the 2016 Researcher and Scholar of the Year awards distributed by the Office of the Vice Chancellor at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
Phone: 312-355-0616
Address: School of Art and Art History
University of Illinois at Chicago
106 Jefferson Hall
929 W Harrison Street, MC 201
Chicago, Illinois 60607

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Workshops by Ömür Harmansah

CFP: NEW ASOR Session "Near Eastern Archaeology as Salvage Operation Ethics, Politics and Method"

Ever since its early beginnings in the 19th century, archaeological fieldwork in the Middle East ... more Ever since its early beginnings in the 19th century, archaeological fieldwork in the Middle East has much too often taken the form of a salvage operation in contexts of fast moving development projects and ongoing military conflicts that threaten cultural heritage. Construction of dam projects, building of roads, railways, and oil lines, large scale irrigation and various infrastructure projects, political instability, intensive looting operations open doors to archaeologists to work in precarious landscapes, working in a fast pace and with duly adjusted methodologies. While the ticking clock of destructive forces and anxious engineers dictate less than desirable methodologies to survey and excavate, salvage operations often lead to unusually intensive investigation of particular regions producing a wealth of regionally specific data, channel unexpected funding resources into archaeological and heritage conservation projects and allow easier acquisition of official permits. The increased scale of development projects in countries such as Turkey, and the threat of violence in countries such as Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan has impacted the way archaeologists do fieldwork, while archaeologists inevitably find themselves in politically charged situations where multiple stakeholders challenge the role of the archaeologist and his/her relationship to local governments, multi-national companies, local communities, and activist groups. This session invites scholars to consider the ethical, political, and methodological issues which concern archaeological field projects that take the form of salvage operations. Both theoretical approaches and on-the-ground case studies are welcome. How has this rescue nature of archaeology impacted and shaped archaeological practice in the Middle East? Where does salvage operation locate archaeologists in the political ecologies of the field? The session will, on the one hand, open a platform for real experiences of salvage archaeology on the ground, such as the recent Ilısu Dam Projects in Southeastern Turkey. On the other hand, salvage archaeology can be adopted as an allegorical concept to debate more theoretically on methodologies, politics and ethics of archaeological fieldwork in the Middle East.

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Embedded! Archaeologists and Anthropologists in Modern Landscapes of Conflict

This workshop is the second leg of the annual Engaged Scholarship Workshops organized by Brown Un... more This workshop is the second leg of the annual Engaged Scholarship Workshops organized by Brown University’s Middle East Studies, under the broader initiative entitled “Knowledge Production, Ethics, Solidarity: Stories from the field.” These two-day workshops take place in the spring of every academic year. The format of the gatherings is explicitly geared towards offering an open platform of critical discussion for controversial topics that emerge from the intersection of academic fieldwork, ethics, social movements and activism. The Second Engaged Scholarship Workshop will be concerned with the contemporary archaeological and anthropological field practices in contexts of war and social conflict and their ethical implications.

In recent decades, both archaeologists and anthropologists who work in the precarious war zones in the Middle East have been increasingly drawn into collaborations with western and local military forces via initiatives such as the so called Human Terrain Systems, adopting military technologies for accessing data about otherwise inaccessible places, and accepting funding from the military for field research. These developments intersect with a cultural/social scientific turn in the U.S. military. Likewise, in recent years, several new archaeological projects have been initiated by western archaeological teams in war-torn countries such as Iraq, Afghanistan and Palestine. Concerns of western institutions for the loss of cultural heritage are often canalized into initiatives to rescue heritage, supported by narratives of global ownership. The methodological, ethical, political, cultural, and practical implications of these new initiatives and collaborations however have been rarely discussed in academic contexts, even though their problematic aspects have been pointed out persistently by several anthropologists and archaeologists, for example through the Network of Concerned Anthropologists. This workshop will provide a platform for an open and critical discussion of the ethical implications of archaeological and anthropological fieldwork in conflict zones in the Middle East, collaborations with the military and what it means to be embedded in the military complex in both the contemporary and the historical contexts.

Workshop Format

The core of the workshop is organized around 3 sessions. Each session is composed of a series of papers and one commentator. Papers will be pre-circulated two weeks ahead of the workshop (due April 15th, 2014) and made available to the discussants so that they can draft their response. The paper presenters will briefly summarize their positions in 12-15 minute presentations, which will be followed by a substantive response from a discussant (20-25 minutes). The workshop will be concluded with two hours of open forum/round table discussion.

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Place Memory, Place Politics: Cultural Perspectives on the Local and Locality

"Places are small, meaningful locales that are brought to existence by everyday experiences and p... more "Places are small, meaningful locales that are brought to existence by everyday experiences and practices of ordinary people, their long term emotional investment, attachment, and sense of belonging. Places are meaningful to local communities due to specific collective memories that are associated with them, the accumulated constellation of material traces and residues of lived experience that configured them over a long period of time, and the events that punctuate place histories. As Arturo Escobar has succinctly put it, “place continues to be an important source of culture and identity” (2008:7) despite the current and pervasive effects of globalization and neoliberal development that brings about the erasure of place. Widely used technologies of mapping in the social sciences and humanities today such as Geographical Information Systems, Remote Sensing and the use declassified military satellite imagery, network models and 3-D visual fly-through reconstructions remain focused on promoting large territories, big picture landscapes, and the visual spectacles of pictorial representation. In this world of dramatic and sweeping perspectives, small places and their cultural biographies are often rendered unmappable, therefore invisible.

Places are inherently politically contested for they are frequently prone to appropriation by political agents and colonial powers. Marko Živković in his “Serbian Landscapes of Dreamtime” spoke of places of power that “have become widely shared symbolic tokens in a particular polity because they accumulated many and varied layers of meaning” and that “the powers that be always seek to insert their ideology through these locations on which we drape our memories.” (Živković 2011: 169). Places of religious practice such as shrines and sacred spots, places of healing and therapeutic landscapes, storied locales such as caves, unusual rock formations and haunted ruins, memorialized locations of significant events, sites of heritage and ancestral memory come to the foreground when thinking about small places.

How do academics in the humanities and the social sciences approach places that are so vital for communities around the world, so widely contested and vulnerable to erasure? This workshop is intended to provide a platform of critical discussion in the humanities and social sciences to explore, map and make visible small places that are draped with particular memories, configured by cultural practices, and contested in political terms. It seeks genealogical approaches to place to unwrap layers of accumulated meaning in the social sphere. Cultural biographies of place, historical and archaeological case studies of socially significant places, studies of politically contested sites of memory, case studies in political ecologies and place-based resistance will form the core of the discussions at the workshop, which will bring together scholars working on contemporary, early modern, medieval and ancient worlds.

WORKSHOP FORMAT

The workshop will start with a keynote address by a prominent thinker on place, politics and memory. Following this, there will be 7-8 formal papers during the workshop divided into three sessions composed of two papers each. Papers will be pre-circulated 2 weeks ahead of time to discussants. Each session will be composed of 30-35 minute presentations of the two formal papers, followed by a 20-25 minute response from the session discussant (preferably to be elected from local UT Austin faculty). Following the response, there will be a 40-45 minute open forum discussion, moderated by the session chair/discussant."

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