When Kamer Aga-Oglu (M.A. 1938) arrived in the United States in 1929 after sailing from Turkey, she was a housewife with a six-year-old daughter.
Over the next 45 years, she would become a graduate student, a divorced mother, a U.S. citizen, a professor, and one of the University of Michigan’s most influential museum curators of the 20th century. She was an accomplished world traveler who studied ancient Asian ceramics held by museums and private collections while building up and sharing the holdings of what is known today as the U-M Museum of Anthropological Archaeology (UMMAA).
Aga-Oglu spent years working with some 8,000 pieces of rare ceramics that U-M archaeologists had excavated in the Philippines in the 1920s. The pieces were the most extensive excavated collection in the world, and they came to the Philippines from Japan, China, and other Asian nations. Aga-Oglu’s research helped to tell the story of how commerce and culture were transmitted between the islands and the mainland.
In the words of a colleague, Aga-Oglu was “unusually cosmopolitan.” A native of Azerbaijan, she studied in Germany, Austria, and Turkey before coming to the United States; she spoke French, German, Turkish, and Russian. In the early 1950s, she took a year’s leave to research ceramics collections in England, Sweden, Holland, Belgium, France, and Turkey.
“If all American scholars were as well equipped from the standpoint of language ability as Mrs. Aga-Oglu, it would be a fortunate thing indeed,” said James B. Griffin, who led the anthropology museum from 1946–1975.
Throughout nearly 35 years with the museum, Aga-Oglu was the lone female curator. Griffin was one of her closest colleagues and strongest advocates, and they retired within a year of each other.
“Tucked away on the fourth floor of the Museums building, you have been able to expand your voice until it has reached the centers of Far Eastern ceramic studies around the world,” Griffin told her in 1974. “It has been a rather long, sometimes pleasant and sometimes trying, journey. Through it all you maintained a poise and purpose which was not diverted by the tribulations of academic existence.”
Aga-Oglu held two master’s degrees—one in history from the University of Istanbul and the second in art history from U-M.
After teaching for 33 years, she was awarded tenure in 1972, a reflection of her lack of a doctorate and U-M’s slow-footedness in granting tenure to women professors. Griffin pushed the History of Art Department to promote her to full professor.
“While she does not have a Ph.D. degree, she does have two M.A. degrees. She had the capability, but there were a number of administrative and other difficulties which made it seem wise in the 1940s that she not finish a Ph.D. program,” he wrote. “During her years of service to the University … she has achieved national and international recognition as an outstanding scholar and contributor to the field of Far Eastern ceramics.”
Aga-Oglu died in 1984 on a field trip to a Cincinnati museum. She was 81.
Photo illustration by Carly Parker
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