About Carel Bertram

My training is in Islamic Art History, so the classes that I have designed at SFSU focus on the visual and the cultural in Islamic cultures (art, architecture, cities, literature.)  I bring my ways of studying the visual and cultural world and my interest in Islamic cultures to all my classes; I also add a study of space and place to the study of other ways that we represent ourselves in the world. My special interest is in the late Ottoman period and the early Turkish Republic, and on memory of places and historical consciousness, especially consciousness of history when remembering a home lost to time or exile.  My book, Imagining the Turkish House [ http://utpress.utexas.edu/index.php/books/berima] uses my background in the Ottoman-Turkish world and the all the ammunition of the Humanities to investigate how houses live in our imaginations and our hearts.  My current work, on Armenians from the diaspora who travel to Anatolia in search of the houses of their lost histories, is also on a Turkish world, and on the way that home is preserved as an image that does meaningful work.     I thrive on what I learn from my studies and from my students.