The American Academy in Rome has announced the selection of the inaugural Getty Foundation Affiliated Fellows following a competitive selection process. Scholars Zakarya Khelif and Emre Gönlügür were chosen by a jury following a call for applications earlier this year. Both Affiliated Fellowships will run from January 30 to July 14, 2023, with the option to return in 2024.
Zakarya Khelif is a researcher in the Department of Historical Archaeology at the National Center for Archaeological Research in Casbah, Algiers. He is also a PhD candidate in the Department of Archaeology at the University of Algiers (expected completion is March 2023). His project, The Roman Domestic Architecture at Tipasa of Mauretania, will examine the ancient elite residence in Tipasa of Mauretania (the present-day city of Tipaza in western Algeria), its main characteristics, and its relationship to its environment. Khelif will focus on three primary examples: “la villa des fresque,” “la maison de lotis,” and “la maison de la mosaïque d'Achille,” tracing their social, economic, and cultural aspects, and how the villas changed over time. Taking an approach that brings together documentary sources and archaeological data, the project will determine the level of Romanization and the acceptance, by local elites, of architectural forms and social practices.
Emre Gönlügür is assistant professor in the Department of Architecture at Izmir University of Economics, in Turkey. His project, Blue Anatolia: The Classical Heritage and Modern Imagination in Mid-Century Turkey, aims to develop a revisionist reading of the Blue Anatolia debate, an artistic and intellectual movement that flourished in Turkey during the 1950s and 1960s. Drawing on the work of writers, artists, and architects who took part in the movement, Gönlügür will argue that the aesthetic project of Blue Anatolianism developed an enlarged conception of cultural heritage and public memory, one that focused on Turkey’s Mediterranean coastline and its classical past. The project will explore how the Blue Anatolianists called for a reinterpretation of the cultural heritage of classical antiquity as a humanistic basis for cultivating a geographically and multiculturally rooted Turkish national identity.
The Getty Global Affiliated Fellowships were created for scholars from underserved regions in the greater Mediterranean basin and will also be awarded during the 2023–24 academic year. Open to art historians, archaeologists, and scholars of visual culture from Turkey, Egypt, North Africa, and Eastern Mediterranean nations, this program is part of a continuing effort to broaden the scope of academic work at the American Academy in Rome.
The Academy will additionally host a research seminar organized by the Getty Global Affiliated Fellows in each of the two years, with related public programs. Through these seminars, the Academy will help expand academic networks across borders, deepen the study of visual culture in overlooked areas, and engage scholars who have not traditionally had the mobility to engage in dominant art-historical conversations.
This program is made possible with support from the Getty Foundation through its Connecting Art Histories initiative. This international grant initiative strengthens art history globally by increasing opportunities for sustained intellectual exchange across national and regional borders.
