[Bilimsel Haber] Call for Papers: Architectural History

[onurinal at onurinal.com]

1st International Meeting EAHN [European Architectural History Network]
Guimarães, Portugal - 17-20 June 2010

Submission deadline: October 30th, 2009
info at eahn2010.org

Call for Papers for the Session
'Authors' of Architectural History from the Ottoman Empire to Nation-States

This session is part of our larger project on the 'authors' of  
cultural histories from the Ottoman Empire to different nation states.  
The histories of the states that emerged at the wake of the  
dissolution of the Ottoman Empire which span a wide geography from the  
Middle East to North Africa to the Balkans are fragmentary and often  
discontinuous with their Ottoman past. Our aim is to probe the larger  
picture of the diverse cultural discourses that preceded and followed  
the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire, which may show unforeseen
parallels and divergences.

In this session, as an extension of that larger project, we aim to  
cover the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by focusing on  
individuals who shaped contemporary discourses of architectural  
history in former Ottoman geography on the margins of Europe. These  
discourses were often informed by larger historiographical projects,  
whereby certain periods, events and individuals were appropriated  
while others were disregarded in connection with how collective pasts  
were shaped in these rapidly changing and ambivalent contexts. We will  
scrutinize different kinds of pasts envisaged, and aesthetics
propagated by these 'pioneer' and 'powerful' individuals, i.e. art and
architectural historians, archaeologists, and museum founders, among  
others; ask, how their historical and aesthetic preferences affected  
the cultural contexts of their time; and also question the possible  
role of contemporary contexts on their production. Our aim is to  
disrupt the seemingly monolithic narratives of culture and history,  
and reveal the multiple voices behind these discourses as formed by  
different subject positions and view points. By anatomizing cases  
imbued by various kinds of modernization as well as nationalism,  
imperialism, and orientalism, we attempt to go beyond the hitherto
tired usage of these concepts by defying conventional oppositions -
particularly geographical oppositions such as the 'West' versus the  
'non-West'- and show that seemingly familiar categories can work in  
unexpected ways.

Please send paper proposals of no more than 300 words by email to: Dr.  
Elvan Altan Ergut, e-mail: tomris at metu.edu.tr and to Dr. Belgin Turan  
Ozkaya, email: belt at metu.edu.tr; address: Middle East Technical  
University, Department of Architecture, Inonu Bulvari, 06531, Ankara,  
TURKEY; phone: 90-312-2102233; fax: 90-312-2107966.

Abstracts are to be headed with the applicant's name, professional  
affiliation [graduate students in brackets], and title of paper or  
position.  Submit with the abstract a short curriculum vitae, home and  
work addresses, email addresses, telephone and fax numbers.