Ariella Aïsha Azoulay

Ariella Aïsha Azoulay is a film essayist and independent curator of anticolonial archives and exhibitions, and Professor of Modern Culture and Media and Comparative Literature at Brown University. Her research and books focus on the potential history of key political concepts and institutions: the archive, sovereignty, art, and human rights. Potential history, a concept and an approach that she has developed over the last decade, has far-reaching implications for the fields of political theory, archival formations, and photography studies.

Azoulay is the author of Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism (2019) and The Civil Contract of Photography (2008). Her films include The World Like a Jewel in the Hand: Unlearning Imperial II (2022) and Un-documented: Undoing Imperial Plunder (2019).