Location BIAA, Atatürk Bulvarı 154/1 and online
Date and time
Wednesday 8 April 2026
15:30 - 16:30 (London BST)
17:30 - 18:30 (Ankara UTC+3)
Speakers
Sean Paxton Silvia
Princeton University and BIAA-ANAMED Fellow
Travelogues by European visitors to Ottoman Anatolia often depict ancient remnants as abandoned.
Yet many of these sites were actually actively inhabited, especially by nomadic and semi-nomadic communities, populations understudied in the growing subfield of reuse studies. These sources overassumed abandonment due to their orientalism, romanticism, and sedentary and chronological biases, but also because of non-malicious, practical matters of nineteenth-century travel and epistemological disconnects. Such over-assumptions persist in modern scholarship that relies on travelogues. This presentation proposes methods to identify overlooked (semi-)nomadic inhabitations despite source limitations, and offers a phenomenological analysis of the experience of inhabiting antiquities as a (semi-)nomad. To recognise this vaster world of reuse is crucial for longue durée histories of Anatolian antiquities and their afterlives.
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Sean Silvia is a PhD Candidate in History at Princeton University studying the reuse of ancient remnants, with a particular focus on the long-nineteenth-century Ottoman Aegean Sea region. His study at Princeton is aided by the Seeger Hellenic Studies graduate funding award. This academic year, he is a joint research fellow here at the BIAA and at ANAMED with Koç Üniversitesi. Before Princeton, Sean earned degrees in Archaeology and History from the University of Southern California, where his thesis received the award for the best undergraduate history honors thesis. He earned an MSt in Classical Archaeology at Oxford University, where he received a distinction. His Oxford studies were funded by the Ertegün Graduate Scholarship Programme in the Humanities.