Hande Sever, a PhD candidate in Visual Arts, and CARTA Graduate Specialization in Anthropogeny student, has been awarded a UC President's Dissertation Year Fellowship for 2026–2027. The competitive fellowship, which includes a $37,500 stipend plus tuition and fees, supports promising doctoral students in the final stages of their research.
Sever’s work operates at a critical intersection of art history, archaeology, and contemporary visual practice. Her dissertation examines sites such as Göbekli Tepe and Karahan Tepe in Anatolia (among the earliest known monumental structures in human history) and traces their mobilization within artistic discourse, particularly by artists engaging questions of human origins. Rather than treating these sites as neutral archaeological referents, her work interrogates how they are reframed within modern visual culture as origins to be claimed, interpreted, and aestheticized. A central focus of the project is Anatolian Humanism, a 20th-century Turkish intellectual formation that positioned modern Turkish culture as the sole inheritor of all civilizations that have inhabited Anatolia. Sever critically examines how this framework operates as a nationalist historiographic apparatus, one that produces continuity through selective appropriation while obscuring and erasing the historical presence of indigenous Anatolian communities.
