Catching Up With: Duygu Camurcuoglu, BM

Written by Duygu Camurcuoglu, Conservator, British Museum

Hello everyone,

My name is Duygu Camurcuoglu and I work as an archaeological objects conservator in the Conservation department at the British Museum. Apart from being a great fan and a supporter, I have been working with the wonderful International Training Programme for some years now. You would have met me when you visited the Conservation department or you would see me in the museum canteen, having a breakfast or lunch, and chatting to some of you about how your time had been with the ITP. Throughout the years, I have had the chance to meet most of you and have built very close and beautiful friendships with some of you. With the ITP’s amazing support, myself and some of the past ITP fellows also organised a successful international workshop called Talking Heavy which took place in 2015 at ANAMED, Istanbul. Thank you so much, ITP and ANAMED!

In addition to studying and conserving the amazing BM collections for various exhibitions, loans, storage and research, I am interested in professional collaborations with colleagues from all over the world as well as training and supporting people in the field of cultural heritage. Currently I am organising and running the conservation sessions for the Iraq Training Scheme at the BM. As I see myself involved in international training more and more, I decided that I should really learn how to make it work efficiently when putting together a training programme and what steps I should follow in order to achieve successful results both for myself and the other colleagues involved.

Of course, the best way to do this is to work with the colleagues who do it best! I am very lucky to have the ITP team right beside me, just across from the BM’s World Conservation and Exhibition Centre (WCEC), so I emailed Claire and asked if I could shadow the ITP team (Claire, Rebecca and Jessica) while they organise the ITP 2018! Claire thought that it was a great idea and kindly started involving me in all the team meetings and explained how things work right from the beginning. So I have been attending all the organisational meetings since December and it has been wonderful to observe the ITP 2018 starting to take shape.

I am so excited to be given this opportunity,  there is nothing as great as developing new skills and doing it with the support of your colleagues who you feel very close to… so once again, thank you very much, ITP team!

Looking forward to seeing and meeting some of you this summer during the ITP 2018!

Duygu