"Materiality, Sacred Space, and Ritual in Hittite Anatolia: Indigenous Ontologies and Local Landscapes"

Ömür Harmanşa
Director, the School of Art & Art History, and Associate Professor of Art History
University of Illinois Chicago

Ömür Harmanşah is Director of the School of Art & Art History and Associate Professor of Art History at the University of Illinois Chicago.

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. 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).