Senior Research Fellows
Cecilia Olovsdotter, Senior researcher
Tel: +90 (0) 212-252 41 19
E-mail: ceciliao@sri.org.tr
Dr Cecilia Olovsdotter holds a three-year senior research fellowship, co-funded by the Bank of Sweden Tercentenary Foundation and the Swedish Royal Academy of Letters, History and Antiquities, at the Swedish Research Institute in Istanbul (SRII). She conducts the project Virtue, status, immortality: on the applications and meanings of architectural motifs in Late Roman and Early Byzantine imagery (c. 180-600) which investigates, through a prominent motif category within late antique art (architectural motifs), the development of visual concepts for representing status and immortality in public contexts during the Late Roman and Early Byzantine period.
Dr Olovsdotter received her doctorate in classical archaeology and ancient history at the University of Gothenburg, where she defended her PhD thesis on the late-antique consular diptychs in 2003, published in a slightly revised version as The consular image. An iconological study of the consular diptychs (Oxford) in 2005. She also has an MA degree in art history (1994). After the conclusion of her doctorate in 2005, she held a one-year fellowship in archaeology at the Swedish Institute in Rome (2005-2006) with the project The sanctuary of Fortuna Primigenia at Praeneste: a study of the correlations between architectural structure and cultic function; a project she subsequently had the opportunity to develop further during a two-year sojourn as a Visiting Scholar at the Department of Classics, University of Texas at Austin (2007-2009). More generally, her research interests concern the development of context-specific iconographies within Roman art tradition, and the survival of these in the Byzantine and Christian era, and also the programmatic employment of symbolic motifs and themes, figural and abstract, in the art and architecture of the Roman and early Byzantine periods.
Åsa Eldén, Senior Researcher
Tel: +90 (0) 212-252 41 19
E-mail: asae@sri.org.tr
Dr Åsa Eldén is a Senior Researcher at the Swedish Research Institute. She is responsible for the project Gendered Violence in the Turkish Media, funded by The Bank of Sweden Tercentenary Foundation and the Swedish Royal Academy of Letters, History and Antiquities.
Eldén has a PhD in sociology from Uppsala University. Her thesis published in 2003 is titled “Life-and-death Honour. Violent Stories about Reputation, Virginity and Honour”. Her research mainly concerns gendered violence in different contexts, with a focus on violence conducted in the name of honour and discourses of honour violence. Her fields of interest also include gender theory, qualitative methods, critical cultural studies, and interconnections of theory and practice, and in her current research she enters media studies. She has been a visiting professor in the department of sociology at Bogaziçi University, Istanbul (2006, 2007, 2011), and is a member of the editorial staff of Sociologisk forskning (Sociological Research). Eldén has also worked extensively outside the academia; as a special investigator for the Swedish government in the “Review of Action to Combat Violence against Women”, as a consultant for the Swedish Institute in Alexandria, Egypt, for shelters and SIPU International, and as a lecturer.