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The Center for Middle Eastern Studies presents
Tuna Şare Ağtürk
Hilles Bush Fellow, Radcliffe Institute of Advanced Study, Harvard University; Associate Professor, Classical Archaeology and Art History, Çanakkale Onsekiz Mart University, Turkey
Tuna Şare Ağtürk is an associate professor of classical archaeology and art history at Çanakkale Onsekiz Mart University in Turkey. Specializing in the art and archaeology of Asia Minor, she has extensively published on ancient dress and identity and on marble, ivory, and terracotta sculpture from Asia Minor. Her recent work in the Çukurbağ neighborhood of the modern city of İzmit has brought to light one of the most significant archaeological discoveries of the last 25 years in Turkey: a monumental imperial complex with brightly painted reliefs from Nicomedia, Diocletian’s capital of the Roman Empire.
As the director of Çukurbağ Archaeological Project, Şare Ağtürk assembled a multidisciplinary team and has been investigating these finds with new archaeometric methods. While at Radcliffe Institute, she is writing a book on the history of Nicomedia as the forerunner of Constantinople and the technical and iconographic assessment of the recent finds within the context of Roman art and architecture. The book will also include sections on the challenges of urban archaeology and cultural heritage preservation in Turkey.
Şare Ağtürk studied archaeology and art history at Bilkent University, earned her PhD at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey, and was a visiting post-doc at New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts. She has received several awards and fellowships, including from the Getty Foundation and the Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey. In order to create academic awareness for her Nicomedia discovery, she gave lectures at such institutions as Columbia University, the Louvre, and the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge.
Image: Painted marble relief, Nicomedia, the embrace of co-ruling Roman emperors Diocletian (emperor of the east) and Maximian (emperor of the west)
Contact: Liz Flanagan