Tugba Tanyeri Erdemir

Biography

Tugba Tanyeri Erdemir is the coordinator of Anti-Defamation League’s Task Force on Middle East Minorities and a Research Associate in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Pittsburgh. Her research interests include the reutilisation and museumification of religious heritage, collection and exhibition of emotionally charged artefacts, ethnographic investigations of converted historic religious buildings, and cultural heritage management of multi-layered sacred sites.

Tugba is co-author of the publication Antagonistic Tolerance: A Comparative Analysis of Competitive Sharing of Religious Sites (Routledge, 2016), and is currently working on a new book project on the challenged museumified status of Hagia Sophia.

Until 2017, she served as Deputy Director of the Centre for Science and Society, Director of the Science and Technology Museum of the Middle East Technical University, and lecturer in the graduate programme on architectural history at Middle East Technical University, Ankara.

From 2007-10, she conducted the project Intellectual Mobility between Turkey and Europe: A History of Archaeology and Museology, funded by the Scientific and Technological Council of Turkey. She was the leader of the Turkish team of the FP7 project RELIGARE: Religious Diversity and Secular Models in Europe. In 2014, she received a Young Scientist Award for her Project titled Sacred Museums from the Hagia Sophia to Haci Bektas: The Effects of Secularizing Museumification Processes on Contestations in Sacred Sites” She is currently working on a project titled A War of Heritage? (Re)Constructing Religioscapes and Competing Territorial Claims in Bosnia Herzegovina since 1995 funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation.

At the British Museum
While attending the International Training Programme in 2015, Tugba was based in the Department of Greece and Rome. Her UK Partner placement was spent with Glasgow Museums.

In 2015 participants were asked to plan and propose a temporary exhibition based on the physical space and concept of the Asahi Shimbun Displays in Room 3 at the British Museum.  Tugba’s exhibition project proposal was entitled Between East and West: Mobility, Interaction and Authority in the Ancient World.

Tugba’s place on the International Training Programme was generously supported by the Marie-Louise von Motesiczky Charitable Trust.

Legacy Projects
In November 2015 Tugba attended the ITP Mumbai Workshop, Creating Museums of World Stories. The workshop was held at CSMVS and was attended by many ITP fellows from different years and countries, UK partners and British Museum Colleagues.

In October 2016 Tugba attended Learning, Engagement and Museums, a four-day conference and workshop held at Cafesjian Centre for the Arts in Yerevan Armenia. The event was attended by 19 Armenian museum educators from 18 institutions, UK partner museum educators from Glasgow Museums, Manchester Art Gallery and The Collection; Lincoln and ITP fellow museum educators from Egypt, India, Lebanon and Turkey.