Dr. Pınar Durgun, who graduated with high honors from Bilkent’s Department of Archaeology in 2010, has been appointed curator at the Vorderasiatische Museum (Museum of Near Eastern Archaeology) in Berlin, one of the world’s most important collections of Near Eastern art and archaeology. As part of the Staatliche Museen Preussischer Kulturbesitz, a government endowment for arts and culture, the museum’s mission is to study, preserve and communicate its collections of Near Eastern artifacts to a growing audience – a particularly challenging task during a global pandemic.
After finishing her Fulbright-supported PhD in archaeology at Brown University, Dr. Durgun was appointed a visiting assistant professor in that department, and was also awarded a J. Clawson Mills Scholarship to study the ancient Anatolian collection in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York as a senior fellow. In 2020, she received a Special Recognition Book Award from the American Society for Overseas Research for a volume she edited, titled “An Educator’s Handbook for Teaching About the Ancient World” (Archaeopress Publishing, Oxford).