Staff Profile

I am currently serving as the Director of the Postgraduate Research Programme at Newcastle.Trained as an architect and a historian of the built environment, I have lived, studied, and worked in Turkey, Spain, USA, and Canada before coming to Newcastle. I look at spaces and the experiences they engender as constitutive and dynamic components of social and political transformations. In my research, I draw inspiration, theoretically and methodologically, from a range of disciplines in the humanities and social sciences—including visual and material culture, political theory, environmental history, and human geography. These interests are reflected in my teaching at all levels, in studios, seminars and doctoral supervision. 

In addition, I am on the editorial boards of Architectural Research Quarterly and the International Journal of Islamic Architecture and regularly review manuscripts for several academic presses. Yet, going beyond the confines of academia to reach broader audiences and underline how important socio-spatial practices are to our understanding of events past and present is just as important to me. This is why, together with some colleagues in the USA, I run PLATFORM, a digital venue that offers well-researched but accessible short-form jargon-free essays on some of the most pressing issues of our time, considered spatially.  

Education and Qualifications
Ph. D., University of California Berkeley
M. Arch., University of California Berkeley
B.Arch., Middle East Technical University

Membership in Professional and Academic Organizations
Chamber of Architects of Turkey – Licensed Architect
European Architectural History Network
Middle Eastern Studies Association
Society of Architectural Historians
Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain
European Association of Urban Historians
Urban History Association
Green College Society, University of British Columbia
Architecture Research Collaborative

Board Membership in Professional and Academic Organizations
Society of Architectural Historians (SAH), Board Member (2008-2011)
Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain (SAHGB), Board Member & Newsletter Editor (2007-2010)
European Architectural History Network (EAHN), Board Member (2007-2010)

RESEARCH INTERESTS
My first book Building the Nation-State: State, Space and Ideology in Early Republican Turkey explored the mostly overlooked role space and spatial practices played in modern Turkey’s transition from an empire into a nation-state. By focusing on the creative and destructive forces operating simultaneously at different yet interdependent scales (from that of the individual body in space to regional geopolitical realignments), I was able to locate the inherent tensions of nation-building that continue to inform Turkish politics to this day. 

My current book project Engineering Eastern Turkey: People, Place and Power examines the Turkish state’s efforts to bring the Upper Euphrates region within its fold, and the local population’s efforts to resist this process. I consider this conflict as a clash between fundamentally different ideologies of landscape. This approach not only foregrounds how geography facilitated or constrained both intervention and resistance, but it demonstrates that controlling this historically unruly and impregnable region with a multi-ethnic and multi-faith population hinged on dismantling indigenous practices of mapping, navigating, and inhabiting the landscape and thoroughly reconfiguring it with modern military and civic infrastructures. Moreover, focusing on landscapes affords an opportunity to desegregate historiographies that have long been constrained by ethnocentric narratives that reduce the complexity of the encounters on the ground.

Studying modern state formation as a spatial process is particularly relevant for understanding enduring ethnic, religious, or racial conflicts that continue to simmer long after the maps stabilize—albeit temporarily. Consequently, I am part of active international research networks that examine modernization and the transformation of the cultural landscapes in the post-Ottoman regions and beyond. 

DOCTORAL SUPERVISION

I currently am taking on doctoral students, please contact me directly if you would like to have a conversation about working together.  
• Modern Architectural and Urban History and Historiography
• Cultural Landscapes
• Space and State Building Processes (including institutional structures, infrastructural projects, military installations, sites and practices of violence)
• Landscape and Environmental History 

RESEARCH FUNDING
Dumbarton Oaks Fellowship for the Study of Gardens and Landscape
Institute of Turkish Studies, Book Publication Grant 
British Academy Small Research Grant for Humanities and Social Sciences
J. Paul Getty Postdoctoral Fellowship
Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture at MIT Postdoctoral Fellowship for Research in Islamic Architecture
Maude Hammond Fling Faculty Research Fellowship (University of Nebraska)
Cecil Green Research Scholar (University of British Columbia)
Izaak Walton Killam Memorial Postdoctoral Fellowship (University of British Columbia)

My research as an urban historian sits at the intersection of human geography, material culture and political science and these interests directly inform my teaching. I have ran thematic MArch thesis studios around generative concepts such as Assemblages and Edge Conditions, which are loose enough for students to explore a broad range of problems in different geographies urban and rural. Informed by my own interests in landscape and environmental history, these have often dealt with issues of sustainability, rewilding, and regeneration. 

Working with students inexperienced in the mechanics of basic academic research and writing is a personal  interest of mine. I was the dissertation elective coordinator the MArch (RIBA Part II) Programme, and currently have taken on this role for the BA programme  (RIBA Part I). In addition I worked on developing our MArch programme's distinctive module, Tools for Thinking about Architecture, which introduces students to the range of research in our school and helps them hone their critical reading and writing skills. Having served as the Degree Programme coordinator for the MArch, I also have acquired significant curriculum design experience. 

• Kezer Zeynep. Remaking Turkey's Polity and Cultural Landscapes. In: Jongerden J, ed. Routledge Handbook of Contemporary Turkey. London, UK: Routledge, 2021.
• Kezer Z. An Unraveling Landscape: Harput and Mezre During Turkey's transition from Empire to Republic. In: Göçek, Fatma Müge; Greenland, Fiona, ed. Cultural Violence and the Destruction of Human Communities: New Theoretical Perspectives. London: Routledge, 2020, pp.183-198.
• Kakalis Christos, Kezer Zeynep. Introduction to "Displaced Practices: People of the Mediterranean Millieu at the End of the Ottoman Empire". Diaspora 2019. In Preparation.
• Kezer Z. Review of Peter H Christensen, Germany and the Ottoman Railways: Art, Empire and Infrastructure, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2017. Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 2019, 78(2), 236-238.
• Kezer Z. Ankara’s Forgotten Mental Maps, Changing Demography and Missing Minorities. In: Fatma Müge Göçek, ed. Contested Spaces in Contemporary Turkey. London: IB Tauris, 2018, pp.60-91.
• Kezer Z. Architecture and the Late Ottoman Historical Imaginary: Reconfiguring the Architectural Past in a Modernizing Empire by Ahmet Ersoy [Book review]. caa.reviews 2017.
• Kezer Z. Building Modern Turkey: State, Space and Ideology in the Early Republic. Pittsburgh, PA (USA): University of Pittsburgh Press, 2015.
• Kezer Z. Spatializing Difference: The Making of an Internal Border in Early Republican Elazığ, Turkey. Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 2014, 73(4), 507-527.
• Kezer Z. Elçilere Layık Bir Başkent (A Capital Fit for Ambassadors). In: Cantek, FS, ed. Cumhuriyetin Ütopyası: Ankara (The Republic’s Utopia: Ankara). Ankara: Gazi University Press, 2012.
• Kezer Z. Of Forgotten People and Forgotten Places: Nation-Building and the Dismantling of Ankara's non-Muslim Landscapes. In: Ruggles, D. Fairchild, ed. On Location: Heritage Cities and Sites. New York: Springer, 2012, pp.169-191.
• Kezer Z. Memleketi Tahayyül Edebilmek: Erken Cumhuriyet Döneminde Milli Eğitimin Maddi Kültürü. Dosya 2011, (27), 79-87.
• Kezer Z. The Making of Early Republican Ankara. Architectural Design 2010, (203), 40-45.
• Kezer Z. An imaginable community: the material culture of nation-building in early republican Turkey. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 2009, 27(3), 508-530.
• Kezer Z. Ankara. In: Gunzberger Makaš, E., Damljanović Conley, T, ed. Capital Cities in the Aftermath of Empires: Planning in Central and Southeastern Europe. London: Routledge, 2009, pp.124-140.
• Kezer Z. Molding the republican generation: the landscapes of learning in early republican Turkey. In: Gutman, M., De Coninck-Smith, N, ed. Designing Modern Childhoods: History, Space, and the Material Culture of Children. Piscataway, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2008, pp.128-151.
• Kezer Z. A Splintered Icon: The Tensions of Politics, Ideology and Representation in Early Republican Ankara. Informationen zur modernen Stadtgeschichte 2005, 2005(1), 38-46.
• Kezer Z. If walls could talk: Exploring the dimensions of heterotopia at the Four Seasons Istanbul Hotel. In: Arnold, D; Ballantyne, A, ed. Architecture as experience : Radical change in spatial practice. London: Routledge, 2004, pp.210-232.
• Kezer Z. Familiar Things in Strange Places: Ankara’s Ethnography Museum and the Legacy of Islam in Republican Turkey. In: McMurry, S., Adams, A.M, ed. People, Power and Place / Perspectives in Vernacular Architecture Volume 8. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2001, pp.101-116.