Talk
Rethinking Occupied Istanbul: Historiography and Public History
28 April 2023 / 18:30
Daniel-Joseph MacArthur-Seal
Gizem Tongo
Chair: K. Mehmet Kentel
Curators of the current exhibition of the Istanbul Research Institute Occupied City: Politics and Daily Life in Istanbul, 1918–1923, Daniel-Joseph MacArthur-Seal and Gizem Tongo, discuss new perspectives and research on Istanbul’s occupation period and how they came to be represented in the exhibition.
The event is free of charge and places are limited. Reservations are not accepted. The event language is Turkish.
About Daniel-Joseph MacArthur-Seal
MacArthur-Seal is the Assistant Director at the British Institute At Ankara and a historian of late Ottoman and early Republican Istanbul. He received his PhD in History from the University of Cambridge in 2015. His dissertation, later published as Britain’s Levantine Empire, 1914–1923 (Oxford University Press, 2021), compares British military occupations in Alexandria, Thessaloniki and Istanbul during the First World War and its aftermath. MacArthur-Seal later joined the British Institute at Ankara as a post-doctoral fellow between 2014 and 2017, working on a research project examining the history of UK-Turkey relations in the first half of the twentieth century, now published as an edited volume, From Enemies to Allies: Turkey and Britain, 1918–1960 (Routledge, 2022). Between 2017 and 2019, he was Research Assistant Professor at Hong Kong Baptist University, while researching the opium trade between Turkey and East Asia in the interwar period. He has published further articles and chapters on nightlife, entertainment, prostitution, and policing in occupied Istanbul, and acted as co-curator to the 2023 Istanbul Research Institute exhibition Occupied City: Politics and Daily Life in Istanbul, 1918–1923.
About Gizem Tongo
Tongo is an art and cultural historian specializing in the history of the late Ottoman Empire. She holds a doctorate in Oriental Studies from University of Oxford, St John’s College, where she was a Lord Dulverton Scholar. Upon graduation, she held two postdoctoral positions, first at the University of Oxford (between 2017 and 2018), and later at the British Institute at Ankara (between 2018 and 2020). She received awards and grants from, among others, University of Oxford, the British Society for Middle Eastern Studies (UK), Barakat Trust, Gulbenkian Foundation, the Orient-Institut Istanbul (Turkey), Hrant Dink Foundation (Turkey), and the International Research Centre of the Historial de la Grande Guerre de Péronne (France). Her publications appeared in academic journals and edited volumes. Among her recent publications is the Bibliography of Armistice-era Istanbul that she co-wrote with Daniel-Joseph MacArthur-Seal (2022). She has also been involved in curating and writing material for exhibitions, including co-curating an exhibition Mihri: A Migrant Painter of Modern Times (Salt Galata, 2019), Occupied City: Politics and Daily Life in Istanbul, 1918–1923 (Istanbul Research Institute, 2023). She has worked as a lecturer in various institutions, including Oxford University, Middle East Technical University, and Victoria and Albert Museum. Currently she is an honorary fellow at the British Institute at Ankara.
