Art historian Berin Golonu will discuss the production of leisure space by looking at selections of Ottoman and Turkish Republican postcard imagery held in the Duke Libraries. Golonu is currently working on a book project on Ottoman sites of leisure referred to as public gardens or "people's gardens," which were modeled after European-style urban parks. Golonu will look at how these gardens replaced older sites of leisure in Thessaloniki and Istanbul, and contextualize their imagery with Ottoman novels, newspaper columns, or memoirs of the day. As public, semi-public and social spaces, these gardens can be viewed as a symptom and cause of the modernizing changes remaking Ottoman society during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Bio: Born in Istanbul, Berin Golonu holds a PhD from the Visual and Cultural Studies Program at the University of Rochester, an MA from the California College of the Arts and a BA from Vassar College. Golonu's research interests include Ottoman and Turkish modern art and visual culture, art and environmentalism in developing Asian countries, and photographic histories of the Middle East. She is currently working on a book titled People's Garden's: Structuring Public Leisure Space in the late Ottoman Empire which traces the establishment of European-style public parks in key Ottoman cities during the late 19th & early 20th centuries.
Department of Asian & Middle Eastern Studies
