VIRTUAL OPEN LECTURE: Memory Mapping and the Historic Greek Communities of Istanbul

Location: Zoom, YouTube Live, Facebook Live, Twitter, Periscope
Date: THURSDAY - 22 Oct. 2020 @ 7:00pm AEST
Presenters: Dr Gönül Bozoğlu 

Language of Presentation: English | No knowledge of Greek required.
Entry: FREE

Synopsis

In this talk, ongoing work with communities whose cultural memory fall outside of official heritage practice will be presented. The historic ‘Rum’ (Greek-speaking) population of Istanbul lives with a hostile history. The current government mobilises the Conquest of Constantinople of 1453 as a proud motif of Turkish national identity, expressed in museum displays and the management of Byzantine heritage in the city. Twentieth-century persecution further alienated the community, leading many of its members to emigrate. The research involved walking, talking, filming and recording with community members to explore and map their memories, building an online resource. The purpose is threefold: to engage with heritages at risk of disappearance; to give voice to communities; and to emphasise and valorise personal, affective and individual understandings of heritage, expanding conventional paradigms and providing counterpoints to state-level heritage.

Bio

Gönül Bozoglu is currently a Leverhulme Research Fellow at Newcastle University, UK, where she undertakes research across heritage, memory, and museum studies, often combining anthropological methods with digital practice and filmmaking. She is the author of the book Museums, Emotion and Memory Culture: the politics of the past in Turkey (2019), published by Routledge Research in Museum Studies. After an MPhil on Ottoman art at Mimar Sinan University in Istanbul and an MA in Museum Studies at Newcastle University, she worked in museums in the UK and on archaeological excavations in the Middle East, and then completed a Ph.D. at Humboldt University in Berlin.

How To Participate

In order to keep everyone safe we have organized this seminar to be delivered online.
However, we are well aware that for some, a large part of the appeal of our seminars is the very active audience participation.

Therefore we are providing two ways for you to enjoy the seminar: 

A. If you want to actively participate and ask questions at the end of the seminar you will need to join us through a Zoom Webinar - for which you'll need to pre-register by following this link:
https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/3716006571174/WN_UMWqPTTQQVucEEJ5Ox0qbA

B. If you prefer to sit back and enjoy the show, just visit our Facebook, YouTube, Twitter or Periscope pages where we'll be live streaming the event.