“All Men Will Be Brothers? Karl Friedrich Schinkel and the Origins of the Berlin Museum”
Can Bilsel is Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Art, Architecture + Art History at the University of San Diego. He is also the founding director of the University of San Diego’s Architecture Program. Professor Bilsel was trained as an architect, before receiving a second professional Masters degree from MIT School of Architecture, and a Ph.D. in the history, theory criticism of architecture at Princeton University.
Bilsel has received numerous awards including the Aga Khan Fellowship at Harvard University and MIT, the Whiting Fellowship in the Humanities, and was a Fellow at the Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles for two consecutive years. In 2007 he was invited as a visiting scholar to the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal. Bilsel is currently completing a book entitled, Antiquity on Display: Regimes of the Authentic in Berlin’s Pergamon Museum, which will be published by the Oxford University Press.
Can Bilsel’s most recent scholarship examines the German reconstructions of Middle Eastern antiquities. In addition, Bilsel has designed and taught introductory architectural history surveys, hands-on history/design workshops, advanced art and architectural history seminars, and an architectural design studio, as well as team-taught Honors courses in the humanities.
Bilsel directs University of San Diego’s summer program in Turkey, where he teaches the course Biographies of World Cities: Istanbul. This is an area he knows well, having begun his career by earning the Bachelor of Architecture degree from Middle East Technical University in Ankara.
Wilhelm Ahlborn after Karl Friedrich Schinkel, Blick in Griechenlands Blüte (A View of Greece in Its Prime), oil on canvas, 1836.
