Course Lecturers
Erdem Denk
Erdem Denk studied International Relations for his first degree at the Faculty of Political Science (Mülkiye), Ankara University. After receiving his MA degree from the same school, he completed his PhD at Cardiff Law School, UK, in 2005. He is a Professor of International Relations at Mülkiye, where he has been working since 1998. He is the author and editor of twelve books (including two collaborations), and several articles on various aspects of international law as well as Turkish Foreign Policy.
His main areas of interest are the theory and history of international law, de-colonial international studies, international organizations, international criminal justice, and nuclear disarmament. He has recently been studying “law and order since Paleolithic” and is preparing three books entitled “When There Was No State”, “Invention of the State” and “History of States”. A general summary of these studies, entitled “50 Thousand Years of World Order: Societies and Their Laws”, was published in September 2021. He has been organizing “Arkeopolitics Conferences/Talks” since October 2022 at Mülkiye. These talks involve an archaeologist and a political scientist every month who respectively discuss prehistoric and modern aspects of any given topic.
Mehmet Özdoğan
Mehmet Özdoğan entered the Prehistory Department of Istanbul University as a student in 1963. He was a student of world-famous scientists in their fields, such as Prof. Dr. Halet Çambel, Prof. Dr. Kurt Bittel, and Prof. Dr. Robert J. Braidwood. Özdoğan, who spent his academic life at Istanbul University, served as the head of the Prehistory Department in 2000.
Özdoğan specialized in the emergence of the settled lifestyle based on food production, known as the Neolithic, and its transfer models to Europe. In this context, he carried out the excavations in Çayönü, Mezraa Teleilat, Yarımburgaz, and Ağır Pınar. He currently continues his work in Thrace, Kırklareli region. Other areas of expertise are archaeological policies, the intellectual structure of archaeology, cultural heritage management, and geoarchaeology. Özdoğan, who is a foreign full member of the United States Academy of Science (NAS), a member of institutions such as the American Archaeological Institute (AIA), and German Archaeological Institutes (DAI), is also a member of the editorial board of many scientific journals published abroad. Özdoğan, who is the recipient of the TÜBA Service Award, the Italian State “Cavaliere” Order, and the Vehbi Koç Foundation 2008 Award, has more than 20 published books and nearly 300 scientific articles.
Ian Hodder
Ian Hodder was trained at the Institute of Archaeology, University College London and at Cambridge University where he obtained his PhD in 1975. After a brief period teaching at Leeds, he returned to Cambridge where he taught until 1999. During that time he became Professor of Archaeology and was elected a Fellow of the British Academy. In 1999 he moved to teach at Stanford University as Dunlevie Family Professor in the Department of Anthropology and Director of the Stanford Archaeology Center. In 2021 he moved to teach at Koç University, Istanbul. His main large-scale excavation projects have been at Haddenham in the east of England and at Çatalhöyük in Turkey where he worked from 1993 to 2018. He has been awarded the Oscar Montelius Medal by the Swedish Society of Antiquaries, the Huxley Memorial Medal by the Royal Anthropological Institute, the Fyssen International Prize, the Gold Medal by the Archaeological Institute of America, and has Honorary Doctorates from Bristol and Leiden Universities. In 2019 he was appointed Companion of the Order of St Michael and St George in the Queen’s Honor List. His main books include Spatial analysis in archaeology (1976 CUP), Symbols in action (1982 CUP), Reading the past (1986 CUP), The domestication of Europe (1990 Blackwell), The archaeological process (1999 Blackwell), The leopard’s tale: revealing the mysteries of Çatalhöyük (2006 Thames and Hudson), Entangled. An archaeology of the relationships between humans and things (2012 Wiley Blackwell), Where are we heading? The evolution of humans and things (2018 Yale).
