BY PELİN SU UZUNCAGİL (AMER IV)
Asst. Prof. Aslı Menevşe received her PhD degree from the Department of the History of Art & Visual Studies at Cornell University in 2021. Her primary area of investigation is the intersection of politics and aesthetics in the public space, with a double emphases on official monuments and radical ephemera.
Aslı Menevşe came to the discipline of Art History from an interdisciplinary background, earning her BA in Political Sciences and Sociology and an MA in History with a concentration on nineteenth-century Ottoman print culture. She then stepped into visual studies at the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University where she received her second MA in Art History. Her methodology is informed by her interdisciplinary background, drawing from political theory, history, philosophy and the intersections of visual art with literature and politics. Her work received funding from several institutions, including a Swann Fellowship from the Library of Congress in Washington D.C. and a Mellon Graduate Fellowship from Cornell’s Society for the Humanities. She is currently teaching HUM 111 and HUM 112 courses.
Why did you choose an academic career?
I did not choose my academic career too knowingly. I found myself in it. I had professors who suggested that I should consider graduate school, and I thought that was a good idea. I’ve always liked school. I was lucky to have great professors who were devoted teachers and fantastic researchers. They inspired me to stay in academia. Last but not least, I am a very curious person. I believe that a truly curious mind is necessary to be an academic.
What do you like the most about being at Bilkent?
Previously, I taught in institutions in the US. I like teaching in the country that I grew up in, especially because I am teaching Humanities. I believe teaching in this field requires you to pay attention to “where” and “when” you and your students are located. Of course, wherever you are you must tap into the contemporary culture and the social and political realities of that place.
What projects are you working on currently?
Currently, I am working on three different projects and each of them is at a different stage of progress. The first one, which I am about to finalize, is on late nineteenth-century French anarchist and radical socialist prints that commemorate their dead. In other words, it is a study on the radical leftist iconographies of martyrdom. The second project that I am working on is quite different. It is centered around a visual representation of Ramadan festivities in Constantinople and was published in an eighteenth-century Dutch encyclopedia. The artist had never been to Istanbul or seen how people celebrate the religious holiday. He had just read a lot of texts and looked at many other images and came up with an image based on his diverse resources. I love the imaginative and truly humanist result. Finally, I am collecting notes on a French syndicalist artist from the turn-of-the-century who devoted his life to unionize workers. In the early 1900s he decided to create a visually arresting booklet series called “the modern slaves” to document the working conditions in different professions. He would visit different workplaces, such as glass factories, bakeries and coal mines, and would interview the workers. He created these beautiful booklets that merged his research with excellent art and critical analysis.
What’s your best work?
That is a question that other people should answer. But I get excited about everything I write. To give an answer, I recently submitted an article that I truly like a lot to a journal. Not only because I spent so much time on it, but also because while I was writing, I was very much engaged with the material. It is a work that operates in a double temporality. One part of the article takes place in 1890s Paris and the other takes place in twenty-first-century New York. I compare the visual languages of the anti-capitalist critique in two different historical moments marked by economic and social crises. The first one is a devastating market crash that also encompassed a questioning of social values. The later timeline is structured around a recent global crisis. My audience here might be too young to remember but I actually visited Zuccotti Park during the Occupy Wall Street protests. The work is about focusing in on two moments when people were experiencing economic crises and how a visual language can capture the financial system that brought such economic and social ruin.
What excites you about your work? And what is the coolest thing about your work?
I always get excited after I teach a good class. I also get very excited when I am doing research in an archive, especially when I stumble upon something that not many people have seen in a while or something that has been ignored. I feel like a time traveler who encounters peoples and ideas on her archive adventures. Finally, I am the most excited when I discern critical connections across diverse contexts, concepts and materials.
What has been the most exciting moment of your career so far? Could you share a turning point or defining moment in your career?
I am an early career researcher so I imagine that it is too early to talk about a “defining moment” for my career. I can say that I am always grateful when I get a good, critical reception to my work.
What’s one piece of information from your field that you think everyone should know?
I would like to share an insight from my field, but I feel like my answer here will be rather personal. It might feel obvious at first but we—all of us—are always looking at things. Our perceptions of who we are and our world are very much shaped by the visuals that surround us. We have become absolutely image-centric cultures. The way that we are consuming images is fundamentally different than how people have done it for the long history of the mankind. It can be both exciting and scary. I understand that art history as a discipline should study how our perceptions inform the visuals we create and how these visuals inform our perceptions in return. Finally, as an art historian, I encourage everyone to be critical of the images that make us and our world.
What’s the most common misconception about your work?
I believe there are several misconceptions about what art historians do. They are mostly generalizations. Most people think that we look at pretty paintings in museums or in wealthy people’s collections and write about them in an attractive manner. For example, some think that an art historian can tell if an artwork is authentic or a copy. I believe that good art history requires a lot of dirty work. You should get lost in the archives or in your research sites. More importantly, in addition to knowing your art, you have a command of several other humanities and social science disciplines.
When do you do your best thinking?
While I am having a conversation with another colleague. If you have an idea, talking through it with another person is important. Of course, I am not talking about a passive audience. A good idea often becomes better when it passes through the challenge and the contribution of others.
What distracts you?
Cat and dog videos on social media.
What are you most curious about?
Everything. Politics, art, history, different cultures, scientific discussions, what my colleagues are working on…
What do you like to do when you are not working?
I love walking. I especially like taking urban walks. I often do not have a specific destination. I see some streets or scenes that I like, and I wander toward them. I walk for hours. I also like working out and swimming. At home, I like to knit and read great works of fiction.
Which books have influenced you the most, and why?
I was not thinking about a career in Humanities when I started my bachelor’s degree in engineering, so I find the books that I read as an undergrad and grad student that transformed me into a young Humanities aspirant the most useful. To give a very incomplete list:
Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, The Invention of Tradition
Edward Said, Orientalism
Karl Marx, Das Capital
Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil
Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing
Nicholas Mirzoeff, The Right to Look
Jacques Ranciere, Proletarian Nights
David Graeber and Marshall Sahlins, On Kings
T. J. Clark, The Painting of Modern Life
Griselda Pollock, Vision and Difference
If you weren’t an academic, what career would you choose?
I like to work with my hands. My parents are farmers. If I did not know how difficult it is to be a farmer, just as a romantic thought, I would like to be one. In a more leisurely dream, however, I would like to have a library-café.
What is the secret of leading a happy life?
I do not assume that I know the answer for everyone. For myself, I think it is having compassion for oneself and others. Second, to have a community. Finally, to have an inexhaustible curiosity toward life.
If you could go back to your undergraduate/graduate student years, what advice would you give to your younger-self?
I was not always aware how amazing it was that I have all this time and space to explore a variety of things. I would really savor that opportunity knowingly and would definitely audit a lot of classes.
If you had unlimited funds, what would you like to do research on?
I would not only spend it on my personal research but on institutions that will be helpful to the community that I am part of. For example, we could restructure and expand the Bilkent library. Yes, we have one of the best libraries in the country but for the research institution that Bilkent aspires to be, it could be improved significantly. I also would create an international institution for Humanities research and collaboration. Imagine having on campus a Humanities research center where scholars from all around the world and different fields could come together and collaborate around shared questions and concerns.
