Yasmine Yakuppur

Yasmine is a fourth-year doctoral candidate in the Department of Art History and Archaeology, specializing in Islamicate arts. Her work focuses on early modern portable objects, mainly ceramic dining wares, in and around Southwest Asia and North Africa, their making, use, and collection. Beyond traditional art-historical scholarship, her work incorporates methodologies of cultural anthropology, socio-economic history, and food culture studies. She champions a postcolonial and historiographical approach, moving beyond art historical categories and iconographical analysis into global migration networks and functional history. Yasmine’s dissertation research examines early modern ceramic dining objects used in the Ottoman Empire within trade networks expanding from China to Europe. 

Yasmine earned a Bachelor of Arts from Columbia University in Art History and Psychology in 2019 and completed a Master of Arts in the History of Art and Architecture of the Islamic Middle East at SOAS, University of London in 2022. Her graduate thesis explored the relationship between the perception of the Turk and of Iznik ceramic dining vessels in England between 1550 and 1700. 

Before beginning her PhD, she worked in childhood arts education and commercial high-end art galleries. Since starting the program, she has received a Provost Diversity Fellowship in the 2022-23 academic year, a Foreign Language Area Studies Fellowship in the Summer of 2023, and has been a GSAS Teaching Fellow since Fall 2023. She has presented her work in conferences at the Columbia Global Center in Istanbul and the University of Groningen, given several lectures for undergraduate courses and colloquia, and published two reviews in the journal 21: Inquiries into Art, History, and the Visual. Yasmine has worked as a Research Assistant to Professor Avinoam Shalem since 2019.