UCLA and Getty Museum Hold Summer Institute in Turkey

UCLA and Getty Museum Hold Summer Institute in Turkey
The UCLA International Institute with support from UCLA's Office of Summer Sessions and funding from the Getty Museum sponsored a four-week summer institute in Istanbul, Turkey, this July under the title "Constructing the Past in the Middle East."

Twenty-three scholars took part in the program, which included lectures by specialists in Middle Eastern art and archaeology, a daunting reading list, and field trips to some of the most famous cities of the ancient world.

The Summer Institute was based at Istanbul's Bilgi University. It was led by Middle Eastern art historians Irene Bierman (UCLA) and Robert Nelson (University of Chicago).

Irene Bierman is a former director of UCLA's Center for Near Eastern Studies and is author of Writing Signs, The Fatimid Public Text (University of California Press, 1998) and a forthcoming book, Art and Islam, to be published by Oxford University Press.

Robert Nelson is the author of Theodore Hagiopetrites, A Late Byzantine Scribe and Illuminator (Vienna: Oesterreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1991) and of the forthcoming Remembering Holy Wisdom: Hagia Sophia, Medieval Church and Modern Monument. He has had a long association with the Getty Museum where he has spent long periods as a Getty Fellow beginning in 1986.

A number of prominent specialists came to Istanbul to deliver lectures, while the participants worked their way thr