Dr. Gülru Çakmak, Associate Professor in the department, was recently appointed the new Chief Editor of H-France Salon. Originating in 2009, H-France Salon is a multimedia journal of French Studies in its broadest sense, encompassing history, literature, cinema, art history, theory, and culture. Salons have included debates and collective reassessments of critical, methodological, and professional issues in our fields, tributes to influential individuals, recordings of conference presentations, webinars, and innovative blog projects.
A specialist of 18th & 19th-century French, English, and Ottoman art, Prof. Çakmak is the author of Jean-Léon Gérôme and the Crisis of History Painting in the 1850s (Liverpool UP, 2017), which examines the period when traditional history painting lost its status as a compelling mode of representation. More recently, Prof. Çakmak is working on two new projects: Materiality, Process and Facture in English and French Sculpture at the End of the Nineteenth-Century and Osman Hamdi and the Long Duration of History. Since 2020, she has also served as Associate Editor of H-France Salon and, with Jennifer Heuer, edited the Salon special issue on "Rethinking Race & Representation in Art History & Material Culture of the 18th- and 19th-Century Francosphere" (vol. 14, issue 8). The journal looks forward to Prof. Çakmak's keen sensitivity to historical questions, interdisciplinary approach to visual culture, and interests in the ways French and francophone cultures intersect with other cultures and societies.