Teaching is a fundamental component of my future interests in academic career. I consider it fruitful and productive when it offers a medium of intellectual exchange between scholars and students. I believe that this exchange is equally a nourishing experience for the researching scholar as it is for the students. I do not consider teaching and scholarly research as two isolated intellectual engagements, and I attempt to maintain substantial overlaps and intimate dialogues between the two. Instead of seeing teaching as a means of communicating established disciplinary knowledges and practices to my students, I regularly invite them to question those canonical knowledges and practices by means of a collaborative effort in critical thinking. For undergraduate teaching in the humanities and social sciences, I maintain that the primary goal is to create an intellectual environment for the students to engage with critical inquiry and collegial dialogue as well as to develop analytical reading and writing skills. I owe at least part of this approach to the energetic, productive and collaborative nature of studio environment in which I took part for eight years in the school of architecture at the Middle East Technical University and I believe it offers an excellent medium for accomplishing such goals.

In the last few years, I have adopted using wikis in designing and running my courses at the Joukowsky Institute. Especially in courses where project-based teaching is highlighted, a user-friendly, web-based, no-password platform for sharing course material, images, ideas, provocative thoughts becomes crucial. Provided that they are not "gated" and cumbersome to navigate, digital environments such as wikis can act as excellent platforms for collaboration and exchange of ideas.

Most of my teaching experience at Penn, at Reed College and now at Brown has focused on the intersection of two major fields of inquiry: art, architecture and material culture of the ancient Near East on the one hand, and the archaeological, architectural, and art-historical theories used in the study of the ancient world on the other. In designing many of the courses, I have attempted to have these two distinct fields continuously inform each other. Below I would like to survey a few of those courses to illustrate how I have conceived them. Syllabi and other course materials of all the mentioned courses are available at my current website.

In the Introduction to Art History course which I offered in three sections during the Fall 2005 and Spring 2006 semesters at Reed College, I have adopted a predominantly theoretical approach to introducing the students to art historical discourse and the discipline, while using carefully selected case studies, ranging from Paleolithic cave paintings to Ottoman miniatures, from European Orientalist paintings to contemporary conceptual art. Art- and architecture-historical issues such as representation, style, narrative, perspective, ideology, space etc. are introduced through intensive readings, conference discussions, and writing exercises that involved museum and site visits. The two exhibitions that took place at Reed’s Cooley Gallery by internationally renowned artists Walid Raad, Mona Hatoum and Gregory Crewdson were the subject matter of several conference discussions and writing exercises during the semester. Furthermore, the visiting artists during the Spring and Fall semesters at Reed, namely Ann Hamilton, Walid Raad and Mona Hatoum, as well as art historians such as David Summers were invited to conference discussions in a variety of my classes and engaged in close dialogues with my students. My students’ involvement with the exhibitions and their ability to have direct contact with the artists and art historians proved extremely exciting and fruitful for them. I hope to pursue such educational strategies in the future as well.

At Reed College, I have taught a number of upper level undergraduate seminars, which were tremendously transformative in my ways of thinking. In “Architecture and Memory: Modern Theories and Ancient Paradigms of Architectural Space between East and West” of the Spring 2006, we examined 19th and 20th century theories of architecture that make use of ancient Near Eastern and classical architecture as their paradigms. During the last two centuries, architectural theory contributed to the construction (or critique) of bipolar categories such as the East and West, ancient and modern, industrial and pre-industrial through their representations. In this course we explored these representations of the ancient and the vernacular in architectural debates, vis-à-vis more recent evidence provided by contemporary archaeological research from the Near East and the Aegean. We also specifically focused on the issues of collective memory and historical consciousness in the context of both ancient and modern architecture. In the “Material Worlds: Skilled Craftsmanship and Symbolic Technologies in Africa and the Near East” of Fall 2005, we explored the recent writings in the emerging field of material culture studies, and drew our case studies from archaeological and ethnoarchaeological materials from the ancient Near East, as well as anthropological and ethnographic case studies from Africa. In Spring 2005, I taught “Contemporary issues in archaeological theory” where students were introduced the foundational discourses in archaeological theory, and were invited to critique those disciplinary canons. This was achieved by exploring contemporary issues in anthropologically informed archaeological theory, such as issues of representation, technique and technology, social complexity and urbanization, ideology and power, gender and sexuality, agency and practice, circulation of knowledge and goods, as well as the study of places, spaces and landscapes.

Most recently, in my first semester at Brown, I have been teaching a lower level undergraduate course entitled Archaeology of Mesopotamia that enabled me to refine my course on the archaeology, material culture and architectural history of the ancient Near East (taught earlier twice at Penn and once at Reed College) into a thematic format with analytically focused case studies. The lectures and most of the visual material are posted on the course website for students’ use and for future reference, perhaps to serve as a draft for a future textbook.

My graduate seminar “Architecture, Body and Performance in the Ancient Near Eastern World” have been very influential in my own scholarly thinking, as we have been reading and discussing theories of the human body and its gendered materiality, cultural performance and performativity, spatiality of the body and its daily performances. Attempting to reconsider a series of archaeological case studies from Near Eastern contexts such as prehistoric and Middle Bronze age clay figurines, Neolithic megalithic monuments, Early Bronze Age royal statuary, Babylonian cult festivals and Assyrian palaces, we have collectively devised an approach informed especially by contemporary theories of gender and sexuality, cultural studies approaches to social performance, anthropological theories of practice and agency, phenomenological approaches to space, place and landscape. Weekly commentaries posted on the course webpage helped to nail down individual responses to some crucial discussions that took place in the classroom. These readings and discussions will certainly continue to inform my own academic work.

In the future I plan to continue teaching courses that focus on the intersections of contemporary theory and the archaeological evidence, with particular emphasis on theories of material culture and architectural space and a broad geographical focus on the ancient Near East and the Eastern Mediterranean world (especially Mesopotamia, Anatolia, Syria, Iran, Egypt and the Levant). Additionally I am also qualified to teach basic courses on classical (Greco-Roman) Mediterranean world and medieval Islamic art and architecture across the Middle East and North Africa. Aside from teaching lower level surveys on those cultural fields, for upper level undergraduate classes, I do favor thematically designed courses such as those that I have taught so far: “Architecture, Body, and Performance,” “Architecture and Memory” and “Material Worlds”, and I plan to design new courses that engage with bodies of theoretical discourse and pursue new readings of relevant art-historical and architectural material, especially those that relate to issues of space, body, representation, gender and sexuality, performance, ideology and social memory.