Ömür Harmanşah Assistant Professor of Archaeology and Egyptology and Ancient Western Asian Studies Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology and the Ancient World and the Department of Egyptology and Ancient Western Asian Studies at Brown University Box 1837 / 70 Waterman Street, Providence, RI 02912, USA. Tel: 401-863-6411 Fax: 401-863-9423 E-mail: Omur_Harmansah@brown.edu Office: Joukowsky Institute 202

• My office hours this semester: Wed 10-12 am and Thu 3-5 pm (and/or by appointment)!
• Ömür Harmansah's Research Profile on Brown's Faculty Research Page
  
• His web page in traditional html format on Brown server (not up-to-date !)

Epigraph (Archived epigraphs).

"Many of my favourite things are broken."

Mario Buatta, interior designer. Quoted in Agha Shahid Ali, Rooms are never finished 55.

Events

• Theoretical Archaeology Group 2010 Meeting at Brown: The Location of Theory Friday, April 30th to Sunday, May 2nd, 2010. Brown University, Providence, RI.

• CRAM Seminar- monthly workshops.

• Open Letter Concerning the Recent Firing of the University of Pennsylvania Museum Researchers. Read the related blog...

• Drawing on rocks, gathering by the water: archaeological fieldwork at rock reliefs, sacred springs and other places. Workshop/conference to be held at the Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology and the Ancient World, March 1st 2008. Streaming video of the whole event.

Projects

• Southern Beyşehir Lake Basin Archaeological Research Project.
• Early and Middle Phrygian Architecture at Gordion.
• Architectural ethnography at Ayanis.
• Stone artisans of the Southeast Anatolian city: landscape, masonry tradition and urban aesthetics (an ethnographic documentary).

Recent Publications

• 2009. “Stones of Ayanis: New Urban Foundations and the Architectonic Culture in Urartu during the 7th C. BC,” in Bautechnik im Antiken und Vorantiken Kleinasien. Internationale Konferenz 13-16. Juni 2007 in Istanbul. (Byzas 9). Martin Bachmann (ed.). Ege Yayınları: Istanbul, 177-197.

• 2009. "The Leech Pond at Kerkenes Dağ" Archeolog (April 30, 2009).

• 2007. “Source of the Tigris: event, place and performance in the Assyrian landscapes of the Early Iron Age,” Archaeological Dialogues 14.2 (December): 179-204.

• 2007. “Upright stones and building narratives: formation of a shared architectural practice in the ancient Near East” in Ancient Near Eastern Art in Context: Studies in Honor of Irene J. Winter by Her Students. Culture and History of the Ancient Near East. Jack Cheng and Marian H. Feldman (eds.). Leiden: Brill Publishers, pp. 69-99.

Course wikiwiki

• ARCH 1200F City and the Festival: Cult Practices and Architectural Production in the Ancient Near East
• AWAS 0800 Introduction to the Ancient Near East
• ARCH 2410 Archaeologies of Place
• ARCH 1710 Architecture and Memory
• ARCH 0030 Art in Antiquity: An Introduction
• ARCH 0250 Intimate Stories: Narrative in Ancient Visual Culture
• ARCH 1800 Contemporary Issues in Archaeological Theory
• ARCH 1600 Archaeologies of the Near East
• ARCH 2300 The Rise (and Demise) of the State in the Near East.
• ARCH 1150 Urbanism in the Archaeological Record
• ARCH 0120 Material Worlds: Art and Agency in the Near East and Africa.
  
• ARCH 0120 City and the Festival: Cult Practices and Architectural Production in the Ancient Near East
• ARCH 0037 Archaeology of Mesopotamia
• ARCH 0201 Architecture, Body and Performance in the Ancient Near Eastern World.
  

Ongoing Undergradute Senior Theses

• Bochay Drum - Comparative Land Ownership.

Recent Work

• New short wiki articles on Place:
  • Places, non-places and supermodernity: on the issues of rooting and uprooting- February 6, 2009.
  • Haptic way of knowing - February 20, 2009
  • Ancestors and the landscape - February 28, 2009
  • The Leech Pond at Kerkenes Dag - March 9, 2009

• Opinion Editorial Piece "The endangered future of the past" with Christopher Witmore. International Herald Tribune, 21 December 2007.

• Archaeolog entry Mapping sitting: datable structures, state imagination and the subordinated body

• On the state:
  • Approaching the Near Eastern state: discourses, practices, performances
  • Durable dispositions: the stele of Hammurabi of Babylon
  • Mapping sitting: datable structures, state imagination and the subordinated body
  • State and its practices: some marginal notes
  • Ideology Performed: Official Ideologies, State Apparatuses, the world we live in

• On body and performance:
  • Modernity, modernisation and the body
  • On shamanism and the materiality of images
  • Representation and the body: the seductive artifact paradigm
  • Figurine worlds
  • The unbound: performativity of bodies, spaces, things I
  • The unbound: performativity of bodies, spaces, things II
  • Performativity of the Uruk Vase: Foregrounded scripts and collective representations

• On materiality:
  • The Automatic Turk: materiality, agency, performance, biography
  • Fetish: towards a theory of powerful things

• Archaeography entries:
  • Panopticon. The Eastern State Penitentiary, Philadelphia
  • Panopticon. The Eastern State Penitentiary, Philadelphia II

• Small projects:
  • Workshop on Interdisciplinary teaching
  • Workshop on Organizing Conferences

Bibliography on Space and Spatiality

Research Bibliography

The Looting Front: what is going on in the world of the destruction of archaeological sites and the abuse of cultural heritage.

Bookshops (I still buy and read actual books- not digital ones, noone reads those):

• Simurg- Istanbul.
• Evil Empire books- placed nowhere.
• Powells Books

Songs:

• Nancy Sinatra Bang bang
• Mana Mou Ellas!
• Doga icin cal ! / Divane Asik Gibi

TAG Notes