The Charlotte W. Newcombe Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship fosters the original and significant study of ethical or religious values in all fields of the humanities and social sciences. The 2018 class, announced by the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation, includes Onder Celik, a doctoral candidate in anthropology at Johns Hopkins University. Onder’s dissertation explores the popular practices regarding the search for treasures that were supposedly buried by victims of the Armenian genocide in Turkey’s Kurdistan.

Onder introduces his project, titled Subterranean Dreams: Hunting for Armenian Treasures in the Post-Genocide Landscape:

I was sitting in a barber shop in a town in Turkey’s Kurdistan, years ago now, waiting for my turn to get a haircut before an “important” interview.  In the hospitable setting of Kurdish barber shops, it didn’t take me too long to start a conversation with the two men sitting next to me. I had been eavesdropping on the conversation between for a while. They were talking about a treasure; a dangerous, cursed treasure.  All treasure stories start with a coincidence in a world shaped by contingency. My story of telling the stories of treasures and treasure hunters is one of them.

For more information about the 2018 Newcombe Fellows and a list of their dissertation titles, click here.

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