Erhan Tamur received his M.A. in Ancient Western Asian Archaeology from Freie Universität
Berlin. His M.A. thesis, published in Forum Kritische Archäologie, focused on the sculptural art
of the Syro-Anatolian city-states in the Iron Age (ca. twelfth to seventh centuries BCE), with an
emphasis on the drawbacks of correlating certain styles with certain ethnicities. In his
dissertation at Columbia, titled “Site-Worlds: Art, Time, and Politics In and Beyond Tello
(ancient Girsu),” he engages with multiple temporalities of a paradigmatic archaeological site in
southern Mesopotamia. His dissertation research is supported by a two-year fellowship from the
Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts (CASVA) of the National Gallery of Art.
His most recent publications include a critical discussion of art-historical theory in the twentieth
century which focuses on the works of Meyer Schapiro and Hans Sedlmayr (published in RES:
Anthropology and Aesthetics), and a research essay on the politics of archaeology and the
introduction of steamship services in Ottoman Iraq (published in the Journal of the Ottoman and
Turkish Studies Foundation). He is also the co-curator of an international loan exhibition on
ancient Mesopotamian art at the Morgan Library & Museum in New York, which will open in
October 2022.
Finally, he is working on a series of articles concerning local sources on Mesopotamian
archaeology in Ottoman and Arabic, exhibition practices in the Ottoman Imperial Museum
(Müze-yi Hümâyun), and the institutionalization of the School of Fine Arts (Sanâyi-i Nefîse
Mektebi) in Istanbul. Erhan will start a two-year position as the Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Curatorial Fellow at
the Metropolitan Museum of Art in fall 2022.
