Durham-affiliated research postgraduates Batuhan Özdemir and Eloise Jones recently won prestigious honours. These awards recognise and support their excellent research into ancient Lycia-Trm̃misa.
Batuhan Özdemir has been awarded an esteemed Post-doctoral Fellowship, jointly hosted by the British Institute at Ankara and Bilkent University. During this fellowship, he will focus on publishing key findings from his research.
Batu recently submitted his PhD dissertation, entitled 'Geopolitics and Cultural Identities in the 19th Century: Framing Charles Fellows’s Lycian Collection in the British Museum'. His work offers a nuanced synthesis and in-depth analysis of how the acquisition of the Lycian ‘marbles’ by the British Museum intersected with pivotal socio-political developments in the 19th century. His study sheds light on how these dynamics continue to shape perceptions of Lycia into the 21st century. A paper with his supervisor, 'Framing Lycia at the British Museum: Class, Colonialism, and the Clash Between the Picturesque-Hellenic Ideal and the Marginalised 'Other' in the C19th', was recently accepted for a conference on the Ancient Mediterranean and the British Museum: Pasts and Futures set for February 2026.
Batu was sponsored by the Turkish Ministry of National Education during his doctoral studies in the UK. He will take up a permanent academic position at Ankara Hacı Bayram Veli University as part of this programme.
George Scharf Jr 1884, view of the Inscribed Pillar, Xanthos, with workers and onlookers. (c) The Trustees of the British Museum
Eloise Jones has won a prestigious Leverhulme Studentship, enabling her to continue her work in Istanbul. Ellie gained an MA in Archaeology from our Department of Archaeology in 2021, and is now engaged in PhD studies at the University of Liverpool under Dr Alan Greaves. She is writing her dissertation titled 'With Flashing Eyes: Femininity, Mythology, and Apotropaism in Lycian Funerary Iconography from the 6th-4th Century BCE'. Ellie’s work considers the art adorning Lycian tombs of the Classical period, and the intersection of beliefs about gender and death that can be gleaned from this. Following her MA, Ellie held a research assistantship at the British Institute at Ankara before embarking on her PhD, for which she receives external supervision from our Department.
Lycian 'sarcophagus' in Fethiye, ancient Telmessos, Türkiye
Both Batu and Ellie have been supervised by Dr Cathie Draycott, who is an expert on the art and archaeology of Iron Age and Classical Western and Central Anatolia, and has published on a number of aspects of Lycian funerary monuments and art. Her most recent paper, 'How do you describe what lies in-between? Bricolage, network thinking and Lycia-Trm̃misa', will be published in a dossier of papers on Lycia in Topoi. Orient-Occident, issue 27 (2024), later this year.
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