Sean Silvia
Contact
Name and title: Sean Silvia
ORCIDhttps://orcid.org/0000-0003-2210-1200 Länk till annan webbplats.
Workplace: Department of Economic History and International Relations Länk till annan webbplats.
Visiting address Universitetsvägen 10 A, plan 9
Postal address Institutionen för ekonomisk historia och internationella relationer106 91 Stockholm
About me
Sean Silvia is a visiting PhD candidate from Princeton University's Department of History, researching the often-overlooked reuse of antiquities in the long-nineteenth-century Ottoman Aegean Sea region and its conflicted entanglements with the history of global antiquities legislation and archaeology. His work intersects with broader conversations on Ottoman diplomacy, the history of knowledge, environmental history, postcoloniality, and heritage management today in Turkey.
While at the Stockholm University Institute for Turkish Studies, his research questions include:
- What do the writings, illustrations, and photographs of Swedish travellers to the Aegean Sea region document about local life in reused antiquities?
- How did Swedish travellers to the Aegean Sea region perceive, interrelate, and make claims upon the heritage landscape there?
- What were the economic consequences of Ottoman heritage legislation on the trade of antiquities transported to be reused?
- How have the Swedish traditions of archaeology, naturalism, and romanticism affected international heritage law and cultural aesthetics?
Sean Silvia earned a Master of Studies in Classical Archaeology with distinction at Oxford University as a fellow of the Ertegün Graduate Scholarship Programme. He received his BA in History and Archaeology from the University of Southern California, where he received the Lois Banner Award for best History honors thesis.
The year before his position in SUITS, he was a joint research fellow at the British Institute of Archaeology in Ankara and the Koç University Research Center for Anatolian Civilizations (ANAMED) in Istanbul.
“Spoiled Terminology: ‘Inhabited reuse” as an alternative paradigm to spolia and other concepts for antiquities reuse in the Ottoman Empire and beyond.” Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies (2026).
With de Boer et al. “Provincializing “New” Diplomatic History: An Interdisciplinary Manifesto.” Diplomatica 7.2 (2025).
“Meandering to the Mediterranean: How Did the Romans Transport Pavonazzetto Marble from the Quarry of Dokimeion to the Sea?” In Cristina Laurenti and John Dinges (eds) Water Flowing through Archaeology. Oxford: British Archaeological Reports (2025).
“The Case of the Missing Antipharos from Ancient Patara’s Port.” Anatolian Studies 75 (2025).
“Representing Classical Sites in the Ottoman Aegean: Artifice, Absence, and Heritage in Late Eighteenth- and Early Nineteenth-Century Western European Travelogue Illustrations.” International Journal of the Classical Tradition 32.1 (2024).
“When Romans Built a Phrygian Rock-Cut Altar: The Çamdibi Necropolis as a Cultural Nexus in the Mountains of Roman Bithynia.” Studia Bithynica: Colloquia Anatolica et Aegaea Congressus internationales Smyrnenses 13 (2023), 52–69.
“The Battleground of Imperial Memory: The Antique Spoliation of the Complex of Algerian Gazi Hasan Paşa on Kos and Its Contestations.” Mediterranean Studies 30.2 (2022), 141–162.
“Decapitation and Dynamite: The Mutilated Mountain-side Monument of Gaius Julius Aquila on the Bithynia et Pontus Coast.” CLARA: Classical Art and Archaeology 7 (2021), 1–25.