Faculty

Muna Güvenç is an architectural historian. Her work, situated in the fields of architectural and urban history, investigates the urban space and its capacity to manifest a complex set of political and social relations, articulate identities and nationalisms, bring together confrontation and conflict, and instigate competition and cooperation. She is especially interested in how politics of difference are institutionalized in local contexts and, at the same time, how this diversification affects cities of the 21st century.  Her current book project, The New Kurds: Urban Politics and the Rise of Kurdish Nationhood in Urban Turkey, critically addresses two main questions: How has it been possible for the Kurdish nationhood to rise in the post-1999 period? In particular, how did the pro-Kurdish party successfully build powerful blocs of Kurdish supporters and give rise to Kurdish mobilization despite the different interests across society as well as diverse means of strong coercion coming from different State institutions toward the Kurdish politics in Turkey ? She argues that the successful transformation of urban space was the key to this historic development for the Kurdish movement in Turkey.

During her time as a graduate student at Berkeley, she taught across different departments including Architecture, City and Regional Planning, Middle Eastern Studies, Peace and Conflict Studies, and International Area Studies. Her areas of teaching and research include: the historiographical traditions of art and architecture in the Middle East, critical urban theory, urbanization and urbanism in the Global South, ethnicity and nationalism, new media and contemporary commemorative art.  Muna Guvenc holds a professional undergraduate degree in Architecture and practiced for five years as an architect in Istanbul.