Main Focus
- Ottoman urban, architectural, and visual culture
- Nineteenth-century architecture
- Turn of the century modernisms
- Nineteenth-century cultural mobilities, collecting, and display
- Digital Humanities
Research Project
Visualizing Europe in Late Ottoman Capital: Photographs, Drawings, and Remediations
Publications (Selection)
- “ ‘So, I've Become The Chief Birdman!’: Envisions of Public Zoological Garden in Istanbul and Ebüzziya’s Field Trip”, in Spectacle, Entertainment, and Recreation in the Modernizing Ottoman Empire, ed. Seda Kula and Nilay Karaca, Bristol 2023, pp. 29–49.
“Traveling Europe, Envisioning Homeland: Istanbul in Two Nineteenth-Century Ottoman Travelogues”, YILLIK: Annual of Istanbul Studies 3 (2021), pp. 69–91.
Curriculum Vitae
Semra Horuz is a historian of architecture specializing in late Ottoman visual and material cultures. Her studies focus on nineteenth-century transformations particularly through the analysis of popular discourses on material culture, individuals’ curiosities, and transnational interactions. She also has an interest in digital humanities as a tool and perspective that sheds light on entanglements pertinent to Islamic art and architecture. She received her MA from the Middle East Technical University (Ankara) and obtained her PhD from the Technical University of Vienna in 2021, both in History of Architecture. During the Fall 2018, she was a visiting doctoral student in Wolfson College at the University of Oxford. Her dissertation, now a book project entitled Ottoman Tour d’Europe: Architecture, Urbanism, and Late Ottoman Travelogues, traces the architectural history of the nineteenth-century Ottoman travelogues on Western Europe. Prior to coming to the Bibliotheca Hertziana, she worked in Istanbul Bilgi and Bahçeşehir University; and between 2022–2023 she was a post-doctoral research fellow in the Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture (AKPIA) at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her scholarship has been supported by the AKPIA, Society of Architectural Historians (SAH), and London Arts & Humanities Partnership (LAHP).