About

I am an architect and architectural historian with a strong interest in digital spatial studies. My research focuses on the intersection of human sciences and urban/architectural space and uses of digital tools that facilitate scholarship in these fields. My dissertation, “Madness and Empire: The Ottoman Asylum, 1830-1930,” is an interdisciplinary study of the connections between psychiatry, architecture, and the city. The dissertation was shortlisted for the BRAIS-De Gruyter 2019 Prize in Islamic Studies. This research received support from Social Science Research Council and Turkish Cultural Foundation.

I have been actively working at the intersection of digital initiatives and design since 2011. I am the co-founder of SpatioScholar, a scholarly digital platform for temporospatial analysis, which has received recognition from New York City Digital Humanities group and an NJIT Seed Grant in 2017. Most recently I was awarded a Getty Foundation Fellowship for the “3D and (Geo)spatial Networks Summer Institute” (Venice, Italy, 2018-2019), for a collaborative project on agent-based modeling framework that aims to enable scholars/researchers to incorporate human or animate subjects and the notion of movement into art/architecture/urban historical inquiry. I received multiple seed grants for interdisciplinary collaborative projects, the latest of which supports the virtual and diffusion analysis of street shrines in Rome using VR. I was involved in other projects such as visualization of complex biomedical ontologies and fully-digital accreditation processes in design schools.

I have combined many of my interests in a recent place-based interactive installation that employed artificial intelligence, [AI]stanbul, developed for the 2018 Istanbul Design Biennial in collaboration with colleagues from Informatics and Digital Design. The installation was on view at Luma-Arles, France and C-Mine in Genk, Belgium during the summer of 2019 as part of the A School of Schools: Design as Learning exhibition.

I have a bachelor of architecture degree from Istanbul Mimar Sinan University, a master’s degree in history and theory of architecture from Yıldız Technical University, and a Ph.D. in Urban Systems jointly offered by NJIT and Rutgers University. I have published and presented on temporospatial analysis of psychiatric spaces, digital art/architectural history, Ottoman insane asylums and imperial hospitals, and Islamic architecture. I teach courses on architectural history and digital humanities. I worked as the managing editor of Arredamento Mimarlik, the Istanbul-based architecture/design monthly. I am currently the Associate Dean of the Albert Dorman Honors College at NJIT.