Gülru Çakmak is an Assistant Professor of Nineteenth-Century European Art. Dr. Çakmak received her Ph.D. with Distinction at Johns Hopkins University in October 2010 with her dissertation entitled Jean-Léon Gérôme: The Innovative Years (1851-1859). Prior to coming to the US, she was awarded an MFA degree at Bilkent University (Ankara, Turkey), MA with Distinction at Central European University (Budapest, Hungary), and M.Phil at the University of Amsterdam (the Netherlands). Dr. Çakmak is the recipient of several nationwide and international fellowships. Most recently in a nationwide competition the American Council of Learned Societies selected Dr. Çakmak as one of sixty-five New Faculty Fellows for 2011-2013. Additionally, Dr. Çakmak was awarded the 2011-2012 Henry Moore Institute Research Fellowship, a residential research fellowship that enabled her to travel and conduct research in the UK in the summer of 2011. Dr. Çakmak has published numerous articles and co-authored a number of scholarly exhibition catalogues. At present, she is working on a book manuscript on the French painter Jean-Léon Gérôme and the crisis of history painting in the nineteenth century.
Her research interests include 18th- and 19th-century French painting and sculpture, history painting and its transformation, modernism, the problem of color in French and British sculpture in the 19th century, Orientalism, Feminism, post-colonial critique.