Fellowship / Fellows

Çiğdem Kafescioğlu

  • 2013–2014
  • Humanities
  • Bogaziçi University (Turkey)
[Photo by Tony Rinaldo]

This information is accurate as of the fellowship year indicated for each fellow.

Çiğdem Kafescioğlu is an associate professor in the Department of History at Boğaziçi University, in Istanbul. She works on aspects of visual, architectural, and urban culture of the early modern Middle East.

With her present book project, Kafescioğlu seeks to understand, through an integrative and multidisciplinary inquiry, early modern conceptualizations and imaginations of the city in an eastern Mediterranean context, in their complex interrelations with urban and architectural practices on one hand and changing political and cultural configurations on the other. She traces the ways in which images of the city and urbanity mediated the articulation of individual and collective identities. She also hopes to delineate the varied and interconnected perspectives of the local and the imperial, the courtly and the urban, the medieval and the early modern, in constructions of urban space and image.

Kafescioğlu has held scholarships from the Aga Khan Program for Islamic Art and Architecture, the Getty Foundation, and the Mrs. Giles Whiting Foundation. She has contributed chapters and articles to numerous books and journals and is the author of Constantinopolis/Istanbul: Cultural Encounter, Imperial Vision, and the Construction of the Ottoman Capital (Penn State University Press, 2010), which won the Spiro Kostof Book Award from the Society of Architectural Historians. Kafescioğlu earned a doctoral degree in fine arts from Harvard University.

Our 2023–2024 Fellows

01 / 09

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