Dr Deniz Turker

A historian of Islamic art and architecture, Deniz is a graduate of Harvard University’s dual degree program in the History of Art and Architecture and Middle Eastern Studies. She previously held the Fari Sayeed Fellowship in Islamic Art at Pembroke College in Cambridge.

She specializes in nineteenth-century Ottoman material culture with particular focus on the art, architecture, and landscape of reform and respective transformations in patronage patterns. She has published on Ottoman collectors, antiquarians, and historians of Islamic art as well as Ottoman garden and landscape histories in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. She has recently co-curated an upcoming exhibition in ANAMED (Istanbul) titled Ottoman Arcadia: The Hamidian Expedition to the Land of Tribal Roots (1886), which is centered on a set of Ottoman, photograph albums gifted to Otto von Bismarck by Sultan Abdülhamid II. As a CIS Research Associate, she is also completing her book manuscripts on Yıldız, the last Ottoman palace complex.

“Prefabs, Chalets, and Home Making in Nineteenth-Century Istanbul,” Ottoman History Podcast, December 2016.

 http://www.ottomanhistorypodcast.com/2017/02/turker.html

Abdüllatif Subhi Paşa’s Cabinet of Coins: Ottoman Bibliophilia, History, and Egypt,” Collecting the Muslim World, Brill: Leiden (Spring, 2018, forthcoming).

“ ‘Every Image is a Thought: Nineteenth-Century Gift-Albums and the Hamidian Visual Archive,” in Ottoman Arcadia: The Hamidian Expedition to the Land of Tribal Roots (Istanbul: Vehbi Koç Foundation, forthcoming).

“Ottoman Horticulture after the Tulip Era: Botanizing Consuls, Garden Diplomacy, and the First Foreign Head-Gardener,” in Botany of Empire in the Long Eighteenth Century, ed. Yota Batsaki, Sarah Burke Cahalan, and Anatole Tchikine (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016), 305-336.

“ ‘I don’t want orange trees, I want something that others don’t have’: Ottoman Head-Gardeners after Mahmud II,” International Journal of Islamic Architecture (IJIA) 4:2, Special Issue on the Conception and Use of Expertise in the Architecture of the Islamic World since 1800 (July 2015):  257–285.

“Hakky-Bey and His Journal, Le Miroir de l’Art Musulman, or, Mir’āt-ı ṣanāyi‘-ī islāmiye, 1898,” in Muqarnas 31 (November, 2014): 277–306.