Ömür Harmanşah

Ömür Harmansah is currently serving as the Director of the School of Art & Art History. His current research focuses on the history of landscapes in the Middle East and the politics of ecology, climate justice, place, and cultural heritage in the age of the Anthropocene. As an archaeologist and an architectural historian of ancient Western Asia (a.k.a. the Near East), Harmansah specializes in the art, architecture, and material culture of Anatolia, Syria, and Mesopotamia during the Bronze and Iron Ages. His earlier research focused on cities, the production of architectural and urban space, critical studies of place and landscape, building technologies and architectural knowledge, and image-making practices in the urban and rural environments. He is the author of two monographs, Cities and the Shaping of Memory in the Ancient Near East, (Cambridge University Press, 2013), and Place, Memory, and Healing: An Archaeology of Anatolian Rock Monuments (Routledge, 2015). He also edited the volume Of Rocks and Water: Towards an Archaeology of Place (Oxbow Books, 2014) and co-edited Scribbling Through History: Graffiti, Places, and People from Antiquity to Modernity (Bloomsbury, 2018). He is one of the authors of the new global art history survey textbook The History of Art: A Global View. Prehistory to the Present (Thames & Hudson, 2021). For other publications, please consult his academia page.

Harmansah co-directed (with Dr. Peri Johnson) Yalburt Yaylasi Archaeological Landscape Research Project, a diachronic regional survey and landscape archaeology project addressing questions of the politics of water and borderlands in Konya Province of west-central Turkey (2010-2021). This project was supported by a major Post-PhD grant from the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, Humanities Without Walls Consortium, Suna-İnan Kıraç Foundation Research Center on Mediterranean Civilizations, The Richard B. Salomon Faculty Research Award at Brown University, and the School of Art and Art History at UIC. Results of this long-term field project are being prepared for publication in the form of a multi-authored monograph.

Harmansah was the Lead Principal Investigator for the 3-year multi-institutional collaborative project entitled “Political Ecology as Practice: A Regional Approach to the Anthropocene” (2017-2019). This project was supported by the Humanities Without Walls consortium, funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. This project included a master class and a symposium with Bruno Latour in October-November 2017. The project was concluded with the exhibition All have the same breath held at Gallery 400 (January 18-March 9, 2019)

Harmansah is currently working on a new monograph on landscape history and political ecology in the Middle East, addressing the challenges brought about by the debates in environmental humanities, particularly around the Anthropocene, climate change, and environmental crisis, with emphasis on landscape archaeology and archaeological field practice. This monograph, tentatively titled Landscapes of the Anthropocene: Archaeology, Politics, and Heritage in the Middle East (under contract with Routledge), brings together fieldwork-based insights from current debates in new materialism and political ecology to discuss the precarity of archaeological landscapes and cultural heritage under the impact of late capitalism.

Born and raised in Turkey, Harmansah studied architecture and architectural history at the Middle East Technical University (Ankara, Turkey), and received his PhD from University of Pennsylvania in the History of Art (2005). He previously taught at Reed College (Portland, OR) and Brown University (Providence, RI) before joining the faculty at UIC’s School of Art & Art History in 2014. He received various sabbatical and research awards, including Koç University’s Research Center for Anatolian Civilizations Senior Fellowship (twice, 2009-2010 and 2019-2020), Brown University’s Cogut Center for the Humanities Faculty Fellowship (Fall 2012), and University of Texas at Austin’s Donald D. Harrington Faculty Research Fellowship (2013-2014). He was elected as a “Rising Star” in Art, Architecture, and the Humanities in 2016 by UIC's Office of the Vice Chancellor.