Fellow at Newcastle University, UK, Dr. Gönül Bozoglu, will present an interesting online lecture entitled Memory Mapping and the Historic Greek Communities of Istanbul, on Thursday 22 October, as part of the Greek History and Culture Seminars, offered by the Greek Community of Melbourne.

In this online lecture, ongoing work with communities whose cultural memory fall outside of official heritage practice will be presented. The historic ‘Rum’ (Greek-speaking) population of Istanbul lives with a hostile history.
The current government mobilises the Conquest of Constantinople of 1453 as a proud motif of Turkish national identity, expressed in museum displays and the management of Byzantine heritage in the city. Twentieth-century persecution further alienated the community, leading many of its members to emigrate.

The research involved walking, talking, filming and recording with community members to explore and map their memories, building an online resource. The purpose is threefold: to engage with heritages at risk of disappearance; to give voice to communities; and to emphasise and valorise personal, affective and individual understandings of heritage, expanding conventional paradigms and providing counterpoints to state-level heritage.

Gönül Bozoglu is currently a Leverhulme Research Fellow at Newcastle University, UK, where she undertakes research across heritage, memory, and museum studies, often combining anthropological methods with digital practice and filmmaking. She is the author of the book Museums, Emotion and Memory Culture: the politics of the past in Turkey (2019), published by Routledge Research in Museum Studies. After an MPhil on Ottoman art at Mimar Sinan University in Istanbul and an MA in Museum Studies at Newcastle University, she worked in museums in the UK and on archaeological excavations in the Middle East, and then completed a Ph.D. at Humboldt University in Berlin.

How to participate
In order to keep everyone safe we have organized this seminar to be delivered online. However, we are well aware that for some, a large part of the appeal of our seminars is the very active audience participation. Therefore we are providing two ways for you to enjoy the seminar:

If you want to actively participate and ask questions at the end of the seminar you will need to join us through a Zoom Webinar - for which you'll need to pre-register by following the link below. If you prefer to sit back and enjoy the show, just join us through our Facebook page or our YouTube page where we'll be live streaming the event.

Where:

Zoom: https://bit.ly/3is8U5L
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/user/gocmv
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Greekcommunitymelb/
When: Thursday 22 October 2020 @ 7.00pm