I was appointed Keeper of Antiquities at the Ashmolean Museum in April 2004. I have since been engaged with the redevelopment of the Ashmolean, which opened to much critical and public acclaim in November 2009. Since the Ashmolean reopened I have given papers on the redevelopment of the museum at seminars and conferences in the universities of Cambridge, London and Kőln. 

My research interest is in Roman glass, and I have published a book and several articles on the Portland Vase and other Roman cameo glass. I am now planning a catalogue of the Wilshere Collection of late Roman gold-glass, sarcophagi and funerary inscriptions, a collection of 68 objects from early fourth-century Rome, acquired by the Ashmolean from Pusey House, Oxford in 2007.

Coming from a Museum background, I am primarily interested in Islamic objects, and how their histories relate to wider social, economic and political history.

I concentrate on ceramics and am currently working on the development of glazed pottery in the early Islamic period, and on the finds from a major medieval production site at Raqqa in northern Syria. Other interests include the history of collecting, fakes and forgeries, and the challenge of museum presentation.

The main focus of my research has been to use geological and geophysical techniques to study the Earth's crust and upper mantle beneath the world's ocean basins and their margins. Seismic, sonar, gravity and magnetic data acquired onboard research ships  help constrain the geological processes that are occurring on the ocean floor as well as the structure and evolution of its most prominent topographic features such as ocean islands and seamounts, mid-ocean ridges and deep-sea trenches.

Current  research is focussed  on the passive margins offshore northeast Brazil, Morocco and Portugal and active margins between New Zealand and Tonga where we are determining the deep seismic structure of the crust and upper mantle and its implications for geological processes such as sediment loading and unloading, submarine volcanism, tectonic erosion and subduction.

I studied architecture in Istanbul, and received my doctoral degree in the history of art and architecture from Harvard University in 2005. I worked at TOBB University in Ankara before coming to Oxford in 2008. I specialize in Ottoman studies (in particular, architecture, cult of the saints, hagiography, historiography and illustrated manuscripts), though my research interests cover the late medieval and early modern Islamic world in general, extending to Iran, Central Asia and India.

I teach Islamic art and architecture to graduate students in the Khalili Research Centre and Ottoman texts and Ottoman history classes to undergraduates in the Oriental Institute.

I am the author of Architecture and Hagiography in the Ottoman Empire: The Politics of Bektashi Shrines in the Classical Age, forthcoming from Ashgate, and am currently working on another book titled Islamic Shrines in the Age of Empires: Hagiographers, Dervishes, Pilgrims and Patrons, under contract with Reaktion Books.