Gül Kale

Dr. Gül Kale is trained as an architect and architectural historian. Before joining Carleton as an Assistant Professor of Architectural History and Theory, she was awarded a Getty/ ACLS postdoctoral fellowship in Art History in 2018-2019. Her areas of expertise are architectural history and theory with a focus on the early modern Ottoman empire, and cross-cultural and global histories and theories of design and of the built environment in the wider Mediterranean world and the Middle East. She is interested in architecture’s relationship to diverse forms of knowledge and sciences from an interdisciplinary perspective. Her book-length project is the first critical analysis of the only early modern book written by a scholar on Ottoman architecture in particular and on Islamic architecture in general. During winter 2019, she has been an AKPIA associate at Harvard University to work on her book manuscript. Her scholarship was also supported by postdoctoral fellowships from the University of Bonn’s Annmarie-Schimmel Kolleg and the Art Histories Program of the Forum Transregionale Studien Berlin. She has internationally conducted research as a visiting scholar at various institutes such as the Kunsthistorisches Institute in Florenz and the Art History Department of the Freie Universität, Berlin. She has also been a research affiliate of the McGill based research project, “Early Modern Conversions.” Her forthcoming articles and works in progress range from the relationship between architectural practice, mathematical knowledge, and social affairs in imperial Istanbul to the link between architecture and music in early modern societies.

Research and Teaching Interests

• The relationship between architecture and sciences
• Ethical/political discourses and decision-making processes on buildings, infrastructure, and cities
• Artist-architects’ biographies and their changing roles in societies
• Intellectual, religiopolitical, and sociocultural foundations of arts and architecture
• Production and dissemination of architectural knowledge in the workshop, in situ, and through books
• Processes and tools of design such as architectural drawings, models, and maps
• Public display and reception of artwork as wonder
• Architectural language, poems, and metaphors

Selected Publications

Kale, Gül. “A Cane and a Kaʿba’ Model: Mediated Experiences in the Early Modern Ottoman Empire,” Res: Anthropology and Aesthetics 75/76 (forthcoming 2021).

Kale, Gül. “From Measuring to Estimation: Definitions of Geometry and Architect-engineer in Early Modern Ottoman Architecture.” Journal of Society of Architectural Historians 80, June 2020, 132–151.

Kale, Gül. “Stuff of the Mind: Table Cabinets and Ottoman Scholars,” in Living with Nature and Things: Contributions to a New Social History of the Middle Islamic Periods, eds. Bethany J. Walker and Abdelkader Al Ghouz, Bonn: Bonn University Press, V&R Unipress Publishers, July 2020, 575–636.

Kale, Gül. “Intersections between the Architect’s Cubit, Science of Surveying, and Social Practices in Cafer Efendi’s Seventeenth-century Book on Ottoman Architecture,” Muqarnas 36, 2019, 131–177.

Kale, Gül. “Visual and Embodied Memory of an Ottoman Architect: Travelling on Campaign, Pilgrimage and Trade Routes in the Middle East,” in The Mercantile Effect: on Art and Exchange in the Islamicate World during the 17th and 18th Centuries, eds. Sussan Babaie and Melanie Gibson, London: Gingko Library, 2017, pp. 118–134.

Kale, Gül. “Review of ‘Risale-i Mimariyye: An Early-Seventeenth Century Ottoman Treatise on Architecture’ edited with an introduction by Howard Crane,” International Journal of Turkish Studies, Vol. 21 (nos. 1 & 2), 2015.

Kale, Gül. “An Architect’s Embrace: Renovating the Sacred House through Rhetoric,” in 99th Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture Conference Proceedings, eds. Alberto Perez-Gomez, Anne Cormier and Annie Pedret, Washington DC: ACSA Press, 2011, pp. 472–479.

Kale, Gül. “The Limits of Creation: Architect as the Mediator of the Beauty and the Beast,” in World Phenomenology Institute Analecta Husserliana Series, Vol. 106, ed. Patricia Trutty Coohill, Heidelberg: Springer, 2010, pp. 19–27.

Kale, Gül. “Risale-i Mimariyye in Ottoman Architectural Historiography,” (in Turkish) Journal of Literature on Turkish Studies, Special Issue on History of Turkish Architecture, Foundation for Sciences and Arts Publ., No: 13, Istanbul, Spring 2009, pp. 405–424.

Kale, Gül. “Notion of Forgetting and Remembering In Piranesi: Fireplace As The Setting Of A Dionysian Play,” in Memory in the Ontopoesis of Life, Book One. Memory in the Generation and Unfolding of Life Series: Analecta Husserliana, Vol. 101, ed. A-T. Tymieniecka, Heidelberg: Springer, 2009, pp. 119–132.

Kale, Gül. “The Interaction of Feminine Characters and Places in Agnès Varda’ s Cléo from 5 to 7 and Vagabond: Images of Women Transformed by Spatial Experiences,” in Design and Cinema;Form follows Film, eds. B. Uluoğlu, A. Enşici, and A. Vatansever, Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2006, pp. 32–48.