Prof. Berin Fatma Gür

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 from 1992 to 1995 and as an instructor from 1995 to 2002. She became an assistant professor in 2002, an associate professor in 2010 (METU), and a professor in 2015 (TEDU). She was awarded a one-year postdoctoral scholarship 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, on reading architectural precedents and topics in contemporary architecture, and on analytical reading of scholarly texts. She has published in international and national journals and books on architectural design and urban design, architectural design education, architectural criticism, ideologies and architecture, and the production of urban space. She served as the head of the TEDU Department of Architecture from 2013 to 2019 and as Vice Dean from 2019 to 2021.

Berin F. Gür was a visiting scholar at the Cornell University Institute for Comparative Modernities (ICM) between August 1, 2022, and July 31, 2023. She spent her time at Cornell and the ICM, working on the book, The Conquest of Istanbul and the Manipulation of Architecture: The Islamist-nationalist Rhetoric of Conquest and Melancholy, which was published by Routledge in 2025. The book explores the contemporary memory of the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople (now Istanbul) in 1453. It focuses on how the conquest is remembered by Islamist- nationalist imagination in Turkey today and how architecture plays a role in shaping this memory, underscoring its susceptibility to political manipulation. Discussing Islamist- nationalist rhetoric of Istanbul’s conquest through the conceptual framework of melancholy, the argument posits that this narrative is a politically driven endeavor fueled by paranoia, producing melancholy over the conquest of Istanbul. The book redefines melancholy as ‘a politically manipulated project’, which anchors the imagery of conquest to spatial and architectural symbols of mourning while creating imaginary lost objects. Architecture becomes the book’s subject as the bearer of clues to the search for lost objects and as a spatial-political tool of conquest rhetoric, such as the Hagia Sophia in Istanbul and the Panorama 1453 History Museum.