She is professor at Izmir Institute of Technology, and conducting architectural design studio, lecturing graduate courses on the relations of architecture with urban, political and cultural context, and collective memory and cultural sustainability. Following her bachelor (1990) and Master of Science (1993) studies at ITU, she has received her doctoral degree from UCL Bartlett School (2003). Her collaborated international research project based on the personal archives of Henri Prost at Paris was exhibited and published. She is the author of Moonlight Monastery (2012) and 10th Year of the Sabancı Museum (2013).
Research interests: Architectural Design, Architectural and Urban Theory and History, relations between modernity, city, social actors and politics, collective memory and cultural sustainability, politics of identity, participatory design process, trans-disciplinary architectural and urban design education, architectural and urban representation, architectural ethics.
Selected papers Akpınar, İ., “The Rebuilding of Istanbul: The Role of Foreign Experts in the Urban Modernisation in the Early Republican Years”, in New Perspectives on Turkey (NPT), Spring 2014, pp. 59-92. ISSN: 1305-3299
Ojalvo, R., Akpınar, I., “A Monument for Turkish Hospitality: the Staging of Ahrida Synagogue”, The Journal of Architecture, vol. 22 , issue 2, March 2017, pp.252-272 , http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13602365.2017.1298653
Akpınar, İ., “Urbanization Represented in the Historical Peninsula: Turkification of Istanbul in the 1950s”, in Mid-Century Modernism in Turkey, Architecture Across Cultures in the 1950s and 1960s, Meltem Ö. Gürel (ed.). New York: Routledge, 2015, pp. 56-84. ISBN-13: 978-1138806092 ISBN-10: 1138806099
