Yasemin Altun

Yasemin Altun is a Ph.D. Candidate in Art History and Visual Culture. 

Yasemin’s research focuses on women artists active in France during the long eighteenth century, particularly those who engaged in group forms of artistic production, including intaglio printmaking, painting à plusieurs mains, and art restoration. Her dissertation, currently titled “Teamwork Makes the Artwork: Women Artists and Collaboration in France, 1663-1791,” argues that collaboration provided significant professional and creative benefits to women artists at a time when they had limited legal and economic agency as individuals. The project explores how group forms of artmaking promoted women’s education, innovation, and commemoration in the visual arts of ancien régime France. Leading case studies include Élisabeth-Sophie Chéron's collaborative prints after engraved gemstones, the partnership between painters Marguerite Gérard and Jean Honoré Fragonard, and the widow-art restorer Marie-Jacob Godefroid. More broadly, Yasemin is interested in early modern (ca. 1500-1800) women artists; the gendering of artistic practices; the space of the early modern artist’s studio; early modern forms of intermediality; the history of authorship; and feminist theories of freedom, power, and otherness. Her advisor is Susanna Caviglia, Associate Professor of Art, Art History & Visual Studies. 

Yasemin is also working toward a Certificate in Feminist Studies from the Graduate Program in Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies.  

In 2018, Yasemin graduated summa cum laude from the University of Florida with a B.A. in Art History and minors in Chemistry and French. Her honors thesis examined the implications of femininity in the art restoration practice of Marie-Jacob Godefroid, a paintings restorer active in mid-eighteenth-century Paris. Before coming to Duke, Yasemin spent a year abroad teaching English in Northern France. She has also held positions at the Samuel P. Harn Museum of Art, the Smithsonian Archives of American Art, and most recently the Musée des Arts décoratifs in Paris.