Rutgers Art Review publishes interview with Ömür Harmanşah
“Bridging Art History and Critical Heritage Studies: A Conversation with Ömür Harmanşah” by Trinidad Rico
Rutgers Art Review (The Graduate Journal of Research in Art History) publishes “Bridging Art History and Critical Heritage Studies: A Conversation with Ömür Harmanşah” by Trinidad Rico (Associate Professor and Director of Cultural Heritage and Preservation Studies in the Department of Art History of Rutgers University)
"In 2015, Ömür Harmanşah’s article ISIS, Heritage, and the Spectacles of Destruction in the Global Media charted an exciting direction for the growth of a critical heritage field. Examining the attention in the media to cultural heritage destruction—smashing of artifacts, iconoclastic bulldozing of archaeological sites, dynamiting of shrines, tombs, and burning of libraries and archives—Harmanşah questioned the “complacent acceptance of ISIS-authored imagery as documentary.” This was a timely wake-up call. The study of heritage and preservation has relied excessively, at times exclusively, on visual and textual documentary archives to establish its own priorities and approaches. Yet, traditional training and debates in this field had not engaged critically and meaningfully with the politics and nuances of visual analysis.2 It took a cross-over scholar like Ömür Harmanşah, fluent in archaeological discourse and heritage ethics, to bring to the foreground the significance of a stronger theoretical and methodological partnership between art history and heritage studies, such as the one driving the Cultural Heritage and Preservation Studies program at Rutgers."