Gamze Saygi is a (visiting) research fellow at the Amsterdam School of Historical Studies. Her research contributes to the studies at the intersection of heritage, history, and digital methods for analyzing and valorizing (im)material cultures of the past.
She received her PhD degree in Architecture in 2016 from Izmir Institute of Technology, Turkey. In 2017 and 2018, she worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the laboratory of Models and Simulations for Architecture and Cultural Heritage of CNRS in Marseille, France.
She joined the University of Amsterdam in April 2019. In her previous (postdoctoral) research project, Digital Urban History, she investigated the building-street interface and the human agency through spatial use, focusing on the cases of Amsterdam and Edo (present-day Tokyo) in the premodern period (1600-1850). Her research expanded answers to historical questions about architecture, lived space, and transformations using digital methods and simulations, demonstrating an innovative method to hypothesize the architectural past and its interconnections with people's lives by cross-examining archival and empirical evidence.