Cicek is a Visiting Research Scholar at the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World at NYU. She received her Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2019, following an MA in Classics at the Florida State University and a BA in Archaeology and Art History at Bilkent University in Ankara, Turkey. She has participated in archaeological projects in Greece, Turkey, and the United States.
Cicek’s research explores the art, archaeology, and social history of Greece in the Early Iron Age and the Archaic period, with particular focus on funerary practices, bioarchaeology, urbanization, state-formation, and spatial analysis. Her dissertation, titled Spatial Narratives of Mortuary Landscapes in Early Iron Age Greece, examines the space and place of burial during the rise of the Greek city-states in the 8th-7th centuries BC. Combining sociological theories on the ontology of space with mortuary analysis, her current research offers new definitions and readings of mortuary space in the ancient Greek world. Her work has been supported by the Wenner-Gren Foundation, Social Science Research Council, and the Archaeological Institute of America.