Short CV

Meltem Gürel received her Ph.D. in Architecture, Master of Architecture, and B.S. degrees both in Architecture and Interior Design from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). Her Ph.D. studies were supported by Francis J. Plym Doctoral Fellowship, Alan K. and Leonarda F. Laing Fellowship, Rexford Newcomb Award, and Edward L. Ryerson Traveling Award in Architecture; and her doctoral dissertation received ARCC/King Student Medal. Her master’s thesis was awarded the Design Committee Award for Outstanding Thesis Project. She was awarded a number of scholarships during her undergraduate studies and graduated as the top of her class. Dr. Gürel practiced architecture in Illinois and New York before joining Bilkent University where she taught until 2018. During this time, she visited UIUC’s School of Architecture as an adjunct professor (1997) and doctoral fellow (2003-2005). At Bilkent, Dr. Gürel served as the Chair of the Interior Architecture and Environmental Design Department (2010-2012) and established the Department of Architecture (2011). She worked as the Founding Chair (2012-2018) of the Department of Architecture until she moved to Izmir as the Dean of the Faculty of Architecture at Yaşar University. Dr. Gürel’s research interests include architectural theory and criticism, cross-cultural histories of modernism with an emphasis on social, gender and cultural studies as they have influenced the built environment, space-culture relationship, landscapes of leisure, domestic space, and design education. She has received numerous grants and recognitions for her research and published articles in leading journals, including Journal of Architectural Education, Journal of Architecture, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Gender, Place and Culture, Journal of Design History, and Journal of Architectural and Planning Research. Her works have also been published in many edited volumes. She is the editor of Mid-Century Modernism in Turkey: Architecture Across Cultures in the 1950s and 1960s (Routledge, 2016).