Cicek Tascioglu Beeby specializes in the art, archaeology, and social history of Greece. At the center of Cicek’s research lies the human body. She has done extensive work on funerary contexts and the manipulation of the human body after death, including bioarchaeology, funerary adornment, cremation, and secondary practices involving human bones. Her interest in the epistemology of the human body has also prompted her to explore embodied space and performance, archaeology of the senses, gender and sexuality, and the construction of personhood in the ancient world. She is particularly interested in the social implications of the representation of bodies in Greek and Roman art and literature, currently focusing on how marginalized bodies—such as women, people with disabilities, and “barbarians”—contribute to the Classical aesthetics of power and privilege. She also works in the fields of museum studies and public humanities, advocating disruptive curatorial practices that bring into question exclusionary histories of museums.
Prior to coming to Brown, Cicek was a Visiting Research Scholar at NYU’s Institute for the Study of the Ancient World (2019-20) and GRI-NEH Postdoctoral Fellow at the Getty Research Institute (2020-21). She received her Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2019, following an MA in Classics at the Florida State University and a BA in Archaeology and Art History at Bilkent University in Ankara, Turkey. She has participated in archaeological projects in Greece, Turkey, and the United States. She currently conducts fieldwork at the Lyktos Archaeological Project on Crete with a focus on the Archaic and Classical settlement and cemetery sectors of the site.