Asli Menevse 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.
Asli came to the discipline of Art History from an interdisciplinary background, earning her B.A. in Political Sciences and Sociology, and an M.A. 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 M.A. 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.
Asli has presented her research both at interdisciplinary and art history conferences and symposia. She has an article (forthcoming) on the nineteenth century Ottoman attitudes towards Hagia Sophia, a world heritage site recently (re)converted into a mosque. She is currently working on an article that connects artworks and performances protesting ‘The Bull’ of the Wall Street during the Occupy Movement to late nineteenth century radical visuals that chose the biblical ‘Golden Calf’ as the face of capitalism. Her next project builds on the theoretical and methodological groundwork of her dissertation to examine the state-led monumental projects in Turkey in the past decade (2011-2021).