Batuhan Özdemir is an archaeologist. He received a PhD in Archaeology from Durham University with a thesis titled Framing Charles Fellows’s Lycian Collection in the British Museum: Geopolitics and Cultural Identities in the 19th Century. His research focuses on the history of collecting and the politics of cultural heritage in the Ottoman Mediterranean. He is particularly interested in Lycian cultural identity and how it was framed through material culture in Victorian imperial and cultural discourses, especially when juxtaposed with the Parthenon Marbles in the British Museum. Batuhan is also interested in Lycian funerary monuments of the 5th century BC and is currently studying the Inscribed Pillar at Xanthus.
During his fellowship at the BIAA, Batuhan will publish parts of his doctoral research as articles and extend this work by investigating how the Trustees of the British Museum, the Foreign Office, the British Ambassador in Constantinople, and Charles Fellows collaborated to devise diplomatic strategies to obtain a firman from the Ottoman Porte permitting the removal of antiquities from Lycia. In addition, he will examine how British collecting practices were formed during two military-backed expeditions to Lycia, and how these operations reflected Britain’s interests in the Ottoman Mediterranean while marking an early shift from antiquarianism to emerging archaeological practices in the first half of the nineteenth century.
Batuhan intends to prepare his dissertation for publication as a monograph and is planning to organise a workshop on collecting at the BIAA in spring 2026.
Field of Expertise: Nineteenth-century archaeology, history of collecting, cultural heritage politics, critical museology, reception studies, Lycian studies, Anglo-Ottoman interactions