Peri Johnson
Adjunct Assistant Professor
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About
Peri Johnson is an adjunct Assistant Professor in the History of Art Department at the University of Illinois at Chicago. She received her Ph.D. in the Art and Archaeology of the Mediterranean World program at the University of Pennsylvania with a dissertation on the Achaemenid Persian landscapes of Paphlagonia, a region in northern central Turkey in the 6th through the 4th centuries BCE. After becoming the field director of the Yalburt Yaylası Archaeological Landscape Research Project in Konya Province in 2010, her research has both leaned towards the 2nd millennium BCE Hittite Empire and become more diachronic. She also participated in the Pompeiopolis Project from 2008 to 2016, and before then, the Kerkenes Project, Gordion Regional Survey, and ceramics analysis of the Kastamonu Project collections. A notable recent publication is the article, “The Archaeology of Hittite Landscapes: A View from the Southwestern Borderlands” in the Journal of Eastern Mediterranean Archaeology and Heritage Studies.
Many of Peri Johnson’s more theoretical interests emerge from the fieldwork encounter, both in the colonial past and the neoimperial present. These range from colonial research as extraction, the illicit antiquities market, and the intertwined destruction of archaeological and ecological landscapes under globalized capitalism. She is working on a book project provisionally titled Archaeology as extraction; fieldwork in the Ottoman Empire and Turkish Republic.
Peri Johnson participated in “Political Ecology as Practice: A Regional Approach to the Anthropocene” (2017-2019) as a member of the Konya Project. She was a collaborator on the exhibition All have the same breath held at Gallery 400 (18 January‒9 March 2019) that concluded the project.