Rate My Professor Ariella Azoulay

Prior to Brown University, where she joined as Assistant Professor in Modern Culture and Media and Comparative Literature in 2013 and was promoted to Professor in 2015, Azoulay served as Senior Lecturer (2002-2011) and Lecturer (1998-2002) in Hermeneutics and Cultural Studies at Bar Ilan University, and Director of the Photo-Lexic Research Group at Tel Aviv University’s Minerva Center (2010-2012). She founded and directed curatorial and theoretical studies programs at Camera Obscura School of Art in Tel Aviv (1995-2002), and held visiting positions including Gladstein Visiting Professor at the University of Connecticut Human Rights Center (2010) and Leverhulme Research Professor at Durham University (2011). Her research specializations encompass the political ontology of photography, civil imagination, potential history, unlearning imperialism, human rights, colonialism, migrations, anti-colonial temporalities, archives, and visuality. Major publications include The Jewelers of the Ummah: A Potential History of the Jewish Muslim World (Verso, 2024), Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism (Verso, 2019), Civil Imagination: A Political Ontology of Photography (Verso, 2012), The Civil Contract of Photography (Zone Books, 2008), and Death’s Showcase: The Power of Image in Contemporary Democracy (MIT Press, 2001). She is a film essayist with works such as Un-documented: Unlearning Imperial Plunder (2019) and curator of exhibitions including Errata (Fundació Antoni Tàpies, Barcelona, 2019). Awards include the 2023 Infinity Award from the International Center of Photography, 2022 Berlin Prize from the American Academy in Berlin, 2010 Igor Zabel Award, and 2002 Infinity Award. At Brown, she has directed Undergraduate Studies in Modern Culture and Media, served on admissions committees, the Governing Board of the Cogut Center for the Humanities, and contributed editorially to journals and book series.