Curating and Teaching Occupation: Displaying Post-Armistice Istanbul

ABSTRACT: This article examines how exhibitions can function as pedagogical and historiographical interventions through a case study of Occupied City: Politics and Daily Life in Istanbul, 1918–1923 . It argues that curatorial practices—object selection, visual design, and multilingual, multivocal sourcing—can foreground the social and cultural dimensions of occupation often marginalized in nationalist narratives. By reflecting on exhibition-making as a mode of historical inquiry, the article demonstrates how public history can generate new approaches to teaching the late Ottoman Empire and its contested legacies.