Prof. Berin Fatma Gür

Biography

Berin F. Gür received a Bachelor of Architecture in 1989, a Master of Architecture in 1991, and a Ph.D. in Architecture in 1999 from the Department of Architecture at the Middle East Technical University (METU). In the same department, she worked as a research assistant between 1992-1995 and as an instructor between 1995-2002. She became an assistant professor in 2002, an associate professor in 2010, and a professor in 2015. She was given a one-year scholarship for postdoctoral research from the Scholarships Foundation of Greece (IKY) and completed her postdoctoral research in 2001 at the National Technical University of Athens. She has taught architectural design since 1992 and teaches classes on the spatial and formal analysis of buildings and their theory, reading architectural precedents and topics in contemporary architecture. She has various publications in international and national journals and books on the processes of architectural design and urban design, architectural design education, architectural criticism, ideologies and architecture, and the production of urban space. She was the head of the TEDU Department of Architecture between 2013-2019 and worked as the Vice Dean between 2019-2021.

Berin F. Gür was a visiting scholar at the Cornell University Institute for Comparative Modernities between August 1, 2022, and July 31, 2023. She spent her time at Cornell and the ICM working on her current book project, “Conquest and Melancholy: The Islamist-nationalist Rhetoric of the Conquest of Istanbul and the Manipulation of Architecture.” The book brings together two seemingly irrelevant terms: “conquest,” associated with glory and victory, and “melancholy,” associated with mourning and grief. The togetherness of conquest and melancholy in this book advocates the re-conceptualization of melancholy as a manipulated project. The following questions are formulated: How is Istanbul’s conquest represented in the Islamist-nationalist imagination? What are the melancholy objects or, in other words, “the lost objects” of the Islamist-nationalist rhetoric of conquest? What are the spatial political instruments of the conquest rhetoric?