Temple University

Müge Durusu-Tanrıöver studies the archaeologies, landscapes, and arts of the eastern Mediterranean, with a specific focus on the hybrid material practices created on the borderlands of Bronze and Iron Age empires. Her research and publications to date concentrated on the Hittite Empire, with a specific emphasis on the imperial strategies of the center that can be traced in material culture and artistic production, as well as the responses of the border regions to Hittite imperialism. Müge is an active field archaeologist. Since 2019, she has been directing the Polatlı Landscape Archaeology and Survey Project (PLAS), for which she received the Archaeological Institute of America’s Richard C. MacDonald Iliad Endowment for Archaeological Research in 2021.  

PhD, Brown University, 2016 
MA, Bilkent University, 2010 
BFA, Bilkent University, 2006 

Selected Awards: 

Archaeological Institute of America Richard C. MacDonald Iliad Endowment for Archaeological Research (2021) 
Project Title: Conflict, Domination and Resistance in Late Bronze Age Anatolia 

Suna & İnan Kıraç Research Center for Mediterranean Civilizations (AKMED) Project Support Program (2019) 
Project Title: Tracing the Hittite Empire’s Western Frontier: Recording the Hittite Heritage of Polatlı, Ankara  

Dean’s Faculty Fellowship, Brown University (2015) 

ARIT Fellowship in the Humanities and Social Sciences, American Research Institute in Turkey (2015) 
Project Title: Between Arzawa and Hattusa: Locating the Second Millennium BCE Material Culture from the Yalburt Yaylası Archaeological Landscape Research Project 

Fulbright Foreign Student Program for Doctoral Degree (2010) 

Selected Works: 

Harmanşah, Ömür, Peri Johnson, Müge Durusu-Tanrıöver, Ben Marsh. 2022. “The Archaeology of Hittite Landscapes: A View from the Southwestern Borderlands.” Journal of Eastern Mediterranean Archaeology and Heritage Studies 10(1): 1-48. 

Durusu-Tanrıöver, Müge. 2021. “Ways of Being Hittite: Empire and Its Borderlands in Late Bronze Age Anatolia and Northern Syria.” Studia Orientalia Electronica 9(2): 3-27. 

Durusu-Tanrıöver, Müge. 2020. “Adapting Reflectance Transformation Imaging (RTI) to Suboptimal Field Conditions Presented by Large-Scale Landscape Monuments: The Case of the Yalburt Yaylası Sacred Pool Complex.” Cedrus: The Journal of Mediterranean Civilisations Studies VIII: 135-146. 

Durusu-Tanrıöver, Müge. 2019. “Now You See Him, Now You Don’t: Anthropomorphic Representations of the Hittite King.” Journal of Near Eastern Studies 78 (2): 287-306. 

Dufton J. Andrew, Durusu-Tanrıöver, Müge and Susan E. Alcock. 2017. “Communicating Classical Archaeology” In Diversity of Classical Archaeology, edited by Rubina Raja and Achim Lichtenberger. Turnhout: Brepols. 

Alcock, Susan E., Dufton, J. Andrew, and Müge Durusu-Tanrıöver. 2016. "Archaeology and the MOOC: Massive, Open, Online and Opportunistic". Journal of Social Archaeology 16 (1): 3-31.