Dr. Alper Metin

Dr. Alper Metin is an architect and architectural historian specializing in the cross-cultural exchanges between the Italian and Ottoman worlds from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century. He studied architecture in Venice, Paris, Rome and Madrid before obtaining his PhD in History of Architecture from Sapienza University of Rome in 2022. Before joining the KHI, he was Adjunct Professor at Sapienza University of Rome, Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Bologna, and the 2025–26 I Tatti–Dumbarton Oaks Joint Fellow at Harvard University. His research focuses on the circulation of architectural knowledge, craftsmanship, materials, and artistic practices across the Mediterranean, particularly between the Ottoman world and the Italian peninsula through the Aegean. He is especially interested in maritime routes of exchange shaped by commerce, conquest, migration, and diasporic communities. His publications have addressed topics including the origins of the so-called Ottoman Baroque, trans-Mediterranean marble networks, architectural patronage, and the built environments of multi-confessional communities in the early modern Eastern Mediterranean. Between 2023 and 2026 he received travel grants from the Istanbul Research Institute, the Gennadius Library in Athens, and the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies.