Core Faculty

• Jenevieve DeLosSantos
• 
• Position: Associate Teaching Professor of Art History
• Ph.D., Rutgers University
• Phone: 848.932.8436
• Email: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
• Office Hours: Via zoom or by appointment in person 35 College Ave, Room 203. Please e-mail
• Research Interests: Director of Special Pedagogic Projects

Jenevieve DeLosSantos is an Associate Teaching Professor of Art History and the Director of Special Pedagogic Projects in the Office of Undergraduate Education, School of Arts and Sciences. She earned her Ph.D. in Art History from Rutgers University in 2015 with a focus in 19^th century American orientalism. Prior to returning to Rutgers in 2016, she was the Coordinator of Academic Programs at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, where she also trained in museum education through the TIME (Teaching in Museum Education) program. Currently, she teaches “Women and Art” and the second half of the survey course, “Introduction to Art History: Art from 1450 to the Present” and has taught Byrne Seminars and courses on Impressionism and Modern Art in the past. She also advises the Art History Student Advisory Board, which brings together majors and minors to build to campus community and deeply engage with art history as a discipline, and serves on the department’s undergraduate curriculum committee.  

For the Office of Undergraduate Education, she works on projects, including running the Interdisciplinary Research Teams, managing dual enrollment programming with New Jersey high schools, coordinating the Voices of Diversity: Rutgers Student Stories panels, and hosting “Tea and Teaching with Jenevieve,” a popular weekly web series on interdisciplinary pedagogy. She is interested in the scholarship of teaching and learning in art history, and her current research explores inclusive and equitable teaching practices, particularly as they relate to the teaching of visual culture and language equity. Some of this can be seen in her co-edited volume of Art Journal Open that explores trauma-informed pedagogy as it relates to the teaching of visual culture and in the forthcoming volume with Rutgers University Press, “Poetries –Politics: A Multi-Lingual Project.” She also serves on the College Art Association’s Education Committee. 

• Deniz Turker
• 
• Department: Department of Art History
• Position: Graduate Program Director; Associate Professor
• Ph.D. History of Art and Architecture & Middle Eastern Studies, Harvard University, 2016
• SMArchS Aga Khan Program in Islamic Architecture, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2007
• Faculty Field(s): Islamic, Architectural History
• Phone: 2158767760
• Email: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
• Office Hours: Office hours by appointment only
• Research Interests: Islamic Art and Architecture, Ottoman and Turkish Art and Architecture, History of Landscapes, History of Photography, History of Islamic Art Collections, Gift Practices and Women's Patronage

Biographical Information:

I am a historian of Islamic art and architecture, specializing in late-Ottoman visual and material cultures. My research explores how modern forms of sovereignty and identity were fashioned through emerging representational technologies, architectural practices, and landscape interventions. My first monograph traces the centurial transformation of Yıldız—the last Ottoman palace in Istanbul—between the 1790s and 1910s. It examines how photography, prefabrication, and artificial landscapes became tools of imperial self-fashioning, while also highlighting the significant roles of women in the Ottoman court and non-courtly contributors in shaping the period’s architectural and garden histories.
My current project investigates historical conceptions of Anatolia and the visual and institutional shifts that accompanied the transition from empire to republic. Focusing on the representation of “Ottoman” versus “Turkish” Anatolia, I analyze the formation of historical and cultural institutions through archaeological excavations, museum practices, ethnographic studies, and state-commissioned artistic surveys. This research builds on the 2018 exhibition Ottoman Arcadia: The Hamidian Expedition to the Land of Tribal Roots (1886), which I co-curated with Ahmet A. Ersoy (Boğaziçi University) and Bahattin Öztuncay (MEŞHER) at ANAMED, and includes work on the modernist photographer Yıldız Moran, whose Anatolian landscapes offer a lens into mid-century visual constructions of national identity, while also reflecting her feminist perspective and commitment to fine-tuning her photographic craft beyond the bounds of nationalist ideology.
In 2023, I co-curated an exhibition based on Greek and Ottoman embroideries from the Fitzwilliam Museum’s collection—once belonging to George de Menasce of Alexandria. This project explores intersections between classical archaeology, textile collecting, and the formation of heritage narratives and national identities in the Eastern Mediterranean.
I maintain a sustained interest in the history of Islamic art collecting, particularly in the 19th-century Ottoman and Egyptian contexts. My research examines how collecting was historically intertwined with historiography, manuscript cultures, and the development of global scholarly and museum networks.
Prior to joining Rutgers University, I held positions at the University of Cambridge as the Fari Sayeed Visiting Fellow in Islamic Art and a postdoctoral research associate at the Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Centre of Islamic Studies. My work has been supported by Dumbarton Oaks, ANAMED, and the Leverhulme Trust.

Undergraduate Classes Taught:

Islamic Art Surveys
Global Art Surveys

Graduate Classes Taught:

Histories of Collecting
Orientalism and Post-Orientalism

Selected Publications:

Books:

The Accidental Palace: Nineteenth-Century Sultans and the Making of Yıldız, 1795-1909 (Penn State Press, 2023.
Co-authored with A. Hilâl Uğurlu. Letters and Gifts in the Harems of Eighteenth-Century Istanbul (Cambridge University Press, The History of Constantinople Series, 2025, forthcoming).
---. Architecture and Interiors of the Harems in Eighteenth-Century Istanbul (Cambridge University Press, The History of Constantinople Series, 2025, forthcoming).

Book chapters:

“Inwards and Outwards: Mazhar Şevket İpşiroğlu, Sabahattin Eyüboğlu, and the Anatolian Horizons of Turkish Art Historiography,” in the Festschift for Gülru Necipoğlu (Brill, 2026, forthcoming).
“The Surveyor’s Gaze: Reconsidering Nineteenth-Century Modalities in Ottoman Painting,” in Survey Practices and Landscape Photography across the Globe, eds. Erin Hyde Nolan and Sophie Junge (London: Routledge, 2022), 259-280.
“Ottoman Horticulture after the Tulip Era: Botanizing Consuls, Garden Diplomacy, and the First Foreign Head-Gardener,” in Botany of Empire in the Long Eighteenth Century, ed. Yota Batsaki, Sarah Burke Cahalan, and Anatole Tchikine (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016), 305-336.
Co-authored with Melis Taner and Faik Gür, “From Empires Past to Nation State: Figurative Public Statues in Istanbul,” in Public Statues Across Time and Cultures, ed. Christopher Dickenson (New York, NY: Routledge, 2021).

Articles:

“‘Professor Wace’s Turkish Sampler’: Ottoman Women Embroiderers and Continental Collectors of Woven Archaeologies,” The Textile Museum Journal 50 ( 2023): 72-90.
“Angels of the Angels”: Abdüllatif Subhi’s Coins, Egypt, and History,” in Muqarnas 39 (November 2022): 193-225.
“Hakky-Bey and His Journal, Le Miroir de l’Art Musulman, or, Mir’āt-ı ṣanāyi‘-ī islāmiye, 1898,” in Muqarnas 31 (November, 2014): 277–306.

Other publications:

“Yıldız Moran and the Archive of Rejection,” in the exhibition catalogue, Yıldız Moran: Kindness of the Shadow (November-December, 2022), Ankara: Galeri Nev Publications, 2022, 17-27.
“‘Every Image is a Thought: Nineteenth-Century Gift-Albums and the Hamidian Visual Archive,” in Abdülhamid II’s Gift-Albums to Otto von Bismarck (Istanbul: Koç University Press, 2018), 64-83.

Selected fellowships, awards and distinctions:

Fellow, Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture, Harvard University 2024-25
Barakat Trust Publication Grant 2024-25
Peter E. Palmquist Memorial Fund for Historical Photographic Research 2024
Harvard-Radcliffe Institute Exploratory Research Seminar (with Prof. C. Kafadar) 2023-24
Leverhulme Early Career Fellow, University of Cambridge, UK. 2019-20

Curated exhibitions:

The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, UK. Exhibition co-curator with Carol Humphreys (The Fitzwilliam) for Threaded Archaeologies:
Mediterranean Embroideries at the Fitzwilliam Museum (April, 2023)
Koç University Research Center for Anatolian Civilizations (ANAMED), Istanbul. Exhibition Co-curator with Ahmet Ersoy (Boğaziçi University) for Ottoman Arcadia: The Hamidian Expedition to the Land of Tribal Roots, 1886 (April, 2018-January, 2019)