14 February 2025
Dr Gönül Bozoğlu (she/her). Lecturer in Museum and Heritage Studies, School of Art History.
Tell us about your research and how it connects to memory/identity studies?
Memory, politics, and identity are strongly linked in museum and heritage studies. How are the past and historical memory experienced, used, represented, diminished, erased, forgotten, and why, by whom and for whom? These are significant questions in museum and heritage studies. In my first book, I researched how the memory of historical events such as the Conquest of Constantinople in 1453 has been represented and circulated through festivities, re-enactments, public imagery, TV shows and a spectacular museum to tell a glorious story of the Ottoman victory. These memory practices are closely linked to the Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, whose ‘Neo-Ottomanism’ appeals to a glorious origin story for Turkey, aligning with a conservative Islamist identity. I also explored how the memory of 1453 meant something distinctive and more complex for other groups, such as secularist and native non-Muslim communities in Turkey. I also endeavoured to explore how digital memory mapping and filmmaking can be used to represent hidden heritages, as alternative platforms for memory practices of marginal communities. In a sense, I was trying to capture with these methods the ‘memory worlds’ in which people live because of their personal and community histories. I think another element is that I see filmmaking itself as ethnography, and it allows me to explore the sensory and affective, emotional, even poetic, aspects of how people experience and live with the memory in the present in ways that can’t be easily managed in other media, and certainly not easily in books and articles.
What are you working on now?
I have produced two documentary films about the memories and heritages of the Greeks of Turkey. I am currently working on the third one to complete a trilogy and on a new book: Worlds of Memory and Sensory Heritage: Living with the Past in the Greek Communities of Istanbul, under contract with Routledge. I am also developing some ideas for the heritage and memories of African Communities in Turkey. Afrikalı Türkler (‘Afro-Turks’) are descended from Sub-Saharan Africans enslaved during the Ottoman period. Subject to Turkey’s historical project of forced assimilation of minorities, Afro-Turks typically speak only Turkish, have little or no knowledge of their ancestry or family connections in Africa. My research will involve working with communities and organisations, including İzmir’s Afro-Turk Foundation, through interviews, memory mapping, filmmaking and co-production methods. These will represent this marginalised group, the identity politics in which different generations are engaged, and what it means to be severed from ancestral histories.
First documentary film, Life After Life: The Greeks of Istanbul: https://vimeo.com/7283640