Suzanne Compagnon is a historian of visual and material culture with a focus on portable arts in the Islamic world, and particularly the arts of the book. More specifically, she is interested in the ontology of images, in material and aesthetic encounters in the early modern period, as well as in questions of materiality and mediality in relation to images and textiles.

As a postdoctoral fellow in the research group “Islam and Arabic”, Suzanne is part of the ongoing research project “Rosewater, nightingale and gunpowder: A sensory history of the Islamic world, 1500-1900” (RONIGU) led by Prof. Dr. Christian Lange. In this context, she investigates how the senses shape aesthetic experience in Ottoman art, considering for instance how painted interiors mediated the multisensory experience of Ottoman elite gatherings.

She is also working on a book based on her PhD thesis. Her thesis titled Clothing and Pictorial Representation in Eighteenth-Century Ottoman Painting: The Levni and Buhari Single Figures explores Ottoman conceptions of pictorial representation through the single figure paintings of two early eighteenth-century Ottoman artists, Abdülcelil Çelebi, better known as Levni, and Abdüllah Buhari. It challenges the idea that European conceptions of pictorial representation were the Ottoman artists’ main point of reference. Instead, it demonstrates that the visual idioms developed by these practitioners are conceptual extensions of an aesthetic framework common to their Ottoman, Safavid, and Mughal sources.

She has taught classes on the arts of the book in the Islamic world in the medieval and early modern period, as well as on cultural exchanges between the Ottoman Empire and Europe. She has also collaborated in an exhibition on Islamic art in Viennese collections and worked as a consultant for the Wien Museum.