Humid day in Providence, July 2006
Currently teaching ancient Near Eastern archaeology/architectural history/material culture at the Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology and the Ancient World in Providence, Rhode Island, a city of dogs. Born March 25, 1971, a snow-stormy night in Konya, that conservative town, of all places in Turkey, as the first child to a middle class Turkish family from Cappadocia (or better Tabal with Iron age toponymy), an agricultural engineer father and a library scientist mother, who wandered across the country, working for the state farms, dragging their 3 children with them. Omur ended up studying architecture in Middle East Technical University, Ankara, who knows why, stuck between a naive desire to become a poet and being good at math. His desire to write about buildings rather than designing them, put him inevitably into the field of architectural history (MA in architectural history, METU, Ankara). His arrival at University of Pennsylvania, threw him to the world of the Ancient Near East and saved him from becoming a boring classical archaeologist and drawing marble pieces forever (he now draws cruder varieties of stone). His last mistake in that sense was to contribute to the Mapping Augustan Rome project with a series of entries, published as a JRA supplement (2002). He recently finished writing a dissertation (which always seemed never-ending) on the utterly esoteric topic of founding new cities in the Ancient Near East. He shares his life with Peri Johnson, and their little daughter Nar (a pomegranate).