My teaching begins with a question that also runs through my research: how do we know what we know? Whether the subject is a museum collection, a development project or an account of world history, I ask students to examine how evidence is produced and how particular explanations acquire authority.
Courses and teaching experience
I have taught undergraduate, postgraduate, doctoral and lifelong-learning students in France, Turkey, the United Kingdom and the United States. My courses include Politics of Heritage, Infrastructural Geographies, Heritage and Memory, Turkey Now and Then, Democracy in Crisis and World Civilizations. These settings have involved different expectations, disciplinary backgrounds and relationships to the histories under discussion.
Teaching world history in Istanbul made the importance of perspective particularly clear. Places treated as distant examples in one classroom were part of students’ immediate surroundings in another. Moving between these contexts required me to reconsider familiar narratives and to make space for questions that a single account of historical development could overlook.
Approach to teaching
In class, I combine close reading and discussion with photographs, archival materials and comparative cases. A monument or a map can become a starting point for asking who made it, what it was meant to show, and what remains outside its frame. The aim is to help students move between concrete evidence and broader analytical questions, while making their reasoning explicit.
I place particular emphasis on constructive disagreement. Students need opportunities to test interpretations, listen carefully and revise an argument without feeling that participation depends on already having the correct answer. My role is to guide discussion and keep it attentive to evidence, while encouraging students to learn from one another.
Writing and research exercises develop these habits further. I ask students to think about the construction of an archive, the formulation of a research question and the use of scholarship across disciplines. This helps them understand research as a practice involving choices and responsibilities.
Supervision and mentoring
My supervision and mentoring include Master’s dissertations, doctoral committees and academic writing workshops. Across these activities, I emphasise clear questions, a workable relationship between claims and evidence, and feedback that helps researchers develop their own judgement.
Teaching and research continually inform one another. My article “Learning by Doing” examines how archaeological knowledge develops through participation in a group’s practices. Classroom discussion offers another setting in which to ask how we learn together, and whose perspectives enter the account.
