Ceren Ozpinar

Dr Ceren Özpınar is a historian specialising in art, visual culture, historiography and exhibitions in the 20th and 21st centuries. Her research focuses on the relationship between gender, identity, community, and art since 1960 with a special focus on Turkey, the Middle East, and their diasporas. Ceren's research interests lie in three key areas: Revisiting art histories; investigating transnational feminist alliances in the wider Middle Eastern geography; and an examination of curatorial strategies and discourses of large-scale exhibitions, such as retrospectives and biennials, in the Global South.

Ceren's research has been supported externally by the British Academy, College Art Association (CAA), the Getty Foundation, Association for Art History (AAH), and the Turkish Research Council (TUBITAK). Internally, in 2020, Ceren was awarded a Rising Star, which is one of the University of Brighton's research awards, for her project "Where Matter Meets Memory: Alternative Political Futures in Kurdish Art Today.” Ceren's project investigates creative works produced within the diasporic Kurdish communities. In 2023, Ceren was awarded the Kickstart Fund, which provided her with the much-needed teaching relief to complete her second monograph. 

Publications

Ceren's latest book, which is her second monograph, Art, Feminism, and Community: Feminist Art Histories from Turkey, 1973-1998, is published in November 2024 with Oxford University Press. This book has been supported by the Association for Art History, the British Academy, and Brighton's Centre for Design History. It investigates the relationship between art history, women-identifying artists, and their lives and communities, building on her Newton research project entitled "Re-visiting Feminist Temporalities in Art and Art History in Turkey from the 1970s onwards" (2015-17).

Her co-edited volume titled Under The Skin: Feminist Art and Art Histories from The Middle East and North Africa Today, was published by Oxford University Press and The British Academy in 2020 (read the reviews in Oxford Art Journal, Third Text and Woman's Art Journal). Her first monograph The Art Historiography in Turkey (1970-2010), which stemmed from her doctoral thesis, was published in 2016 by the History Foundation (Tarih Vakfi) Press.

Ceren's latest articles appeared in the Art Journal, Art in Translation, Art & the Public Sphere, and Third Text. She wrote several essays for edited volumes and special issues on invitation, including Image & Text (ed. Schmahmann), A Companion to Contemporary Art in a Global Framework (eds. Jones & Davidson), and Transnational Perspectives on Feminism and Art, 1960-1985 (eds. Kennedy, Szymanek & Mallory).

Dr Ceren Özpınar is a Senior Lecturer and Course Leader for BA (Hons) Art History and Visual Culture. She has taught in the areas of art and cultural history, critical studies, art management and visual culture since 2008. Before coming to Brighton, she held post- and pre-doctoral fellowships: a British Academy Newton International Fellowship at the University of Sussex (2015-17), and a Visiting Research Fellowship at the University of Leeds (2013-14). Ceren completed her PhD in History of Art at Istanbul Technical University in 2015. She also holds an MA in Fashion and Textile Design and a BA in Art Management with Curating. 

Ceren has a PGCert in Teaching & Learning in Higher Education and is Fellow of the Advance HE (FHEA). At Brighton, she has taught on art history and visual culture courses since 2017. She teaches across core modules and has delivered specialist modules including Sexual Politics: Art and Feminism, Understanding Exhibitions and Creating Displays, and Gender and Sexuality in Art and Visual Culture. Ceren also taught Historical and Critical Studies to BA (Hons) Painting, BA (Hons) Sculpture, BA (Hons) Critical Practice and BA (Hons) Printmaking between 2017 and 2021. Before this, Ceren had a stellar career as a lecturer in Istanbul, Turkey, teaching at prestigious universities such as Bilgi and Kadir Has, starting in 2008. 

Ceren currently sits on the University's Cross-School Research Ethics Committee, the School Tier 1 Ethics Committee, and the EDI/Athena Swan Committee. She co-led Research Mentoring activity in the School of Humanities and Social Science (2022-24), developing and evaluating the research mentoring programme to ensure that it was wide-reaching and inclusive. She also represented the School on the University Research Mentoring Group. 

Ceren sits on the Editorial Board of Art History (2025-) and Feminist Art Practices and Research: Cosmos (2025-). She is Advisory Board member for Sheikh Zayed Visual Arts Series at American University of Beirut Press (2024-), and for Manazir (2023-), a peer-reviewed journal and online platform for the study of visual arts, architecture and heritage in the Middle East and North Africa. Ceren also sits on Association for Art History's Higher Education Committee (2024-).

She is an Expert Evaluator for the European Commission's Horizon 2020, the British Academy, and the British Institute at Ankara, and a member of the Techne Peer Review College. She regularly undertakes peer reviews for journals including Art History, Art in Translation, Journal of the Middle East Women's Studies, Visual Studies, and World Art; and publishers including Edinburgh University Press, Bloomsbury Academic, and University of California Press.

Ceren leads a team of researchers for the Paris-based AWARE (Archives of Women Artists Research and Exhibitions) since 2020, contributing biographies of women artists from the Middle East to their online database.

Ceren welcomes media requests. Check out her latest press appearance in the Apollo Art Magazine.

Dr Ceren Özpınar has supervised two PhDs to completion, and currently supervises three PhD students at Brighton, who work on subjects in lesser-known women artists in the 20th century, feminism in the museum, representation of lesbian lives in collections, and transnational art and design practices. She has examined one PhD to date.

Ceren would be interested in supervising PhD projects on feminist and queer approaches to art; transnational art histories; narratives of difference; memory and materiality. She would also welcome proposals interested in researching any aspect of the project of decolonising the history of art and exhibitions, particularly but not exclusively, in the Mediterranean, Middle Eastern and North African geographies.

Ceren also hosts visiting doctoral researchers on a regular basis. If you are working on a PhD project at another institution related to her research expertise and would like to be supervised by her at Brighton for a short period (up to a year), feel free to contact her.