About

Giulia Paoletti is a historian and curator of art and photography with a focus on nineteenth and twentieth century African art. She earned her Ph.D. from Columbia University in 2015. Her book Portrait and Place: Photography in Senegal, 1840-1960, published by Princeton University Press in 2024, offers the first extended study of photography in one of Africa’s epicenters of modernity and was awarded the 2024 Photography Network Book Award. Her work has been published in various edited volumes and journals including Art History, Cahiers d'études africaines, the Metropolitan Museum Journal, Art in Translation, Journal of African History, Troubles dans les collections, African Arts, and MoMA Post. She has received support for her research and writing from several prestigious institutions such as the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS)/Getty, the Arts Council of the African Studies Association (ACASA), the National Museum of African Art at Smithsonian, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston. Additionally, she has co-curated three exhibitions on historical and contemporary photography from Africa at notable venues including the Metropolitan Museum, the Wallach Gallery, and the Dak’art Biennial OFF 2018. At the University of Virginia, she teaches undergraduate and graduate courses on Africa’s histories of photography, modern and contemporary art, classical arts, and exhibition histories. Currently, she is working on her second research project on the relation between photography and textile, in collaboration with Dr. Sandrine Colard, and she is the co-director of The Siren Project.

Research topics

• History
• Sociology
• Meteorology
• Visual arts
• Art
• Art history
• Ancient history
• Media studies
• Psychoanalysis
• Archaeology
• Geography
• Psychology
• Philosophy

Selected publications

• Innovative use of mycelium in construction

  Środowisko Mieszkaniowe · 2024-12-01

  articleOpen access

  Abstract The goal of the interdisciplinary study presented in this paper was to identify opportunities for innovative applications of mycelium in construction, including housing construction. This solution is gaining significance due to its sustainability and eco-friendliness. Mycelium can be seen as an innovative alternative to traditional building materials, and can be transformed into permanent structures using mycotecture. In 2023, within the framework of cooperation between researchers from the Warsaw University of Technology and experts from the Łukasiewicz Research Network Institute, an experimental study was conducted and produced interesting results. The study is at the testing stage. The interdisciplinary research team grew to include researchers from the Cracow University of Technology, Eurac Research from Italy and InnoRenew CoE from Slovenia. The methodology of research on mycotecture is a comprehensive process that begins with defining research goals and analyzing the literature. After analyzing existing cases and drawing conclusions, research experiments are designed, which include both laboratory tests and field tests. Field tests of the material produced during the study was linked with the participation of students from the Warsaw University of Technology, who built the Future Pavilion also known as the “We Stand For” initiative, where a prototype mycelium brick was used in the pavilion’s structure.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Women and Violence in the Late Medieval Mediterranean, ca. 1100–1500

  Routledge eBooks · 2021 · 2 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding
  • History
  • Ancient history
  • Archaeology
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Introduction

  Routledge eBooks · 2021

  Senior authorCorresponding
  • Philosophy

  In the Introduction, the editors explain what the aims of the volume are by reflecting on the rationale behind their choice of themes, approaches, chronology and geographical area. They present an overview of the most important orientations in the study of the relationship between women and violence in the recent historiography of medieval Latin Europe, Byzantium and the Islamic world. Their contributions to the present volume are highlighted, as well as the limits and the gaps in scholarly knowledge emerging from them, and which this book intends to contribute to overcoming. The influence of various approaches stemming from the social sciences (in particular, feminist criminology and interactionist and constructionist sociology) in building the theoretical framework of this volume is described. The study of long-term dynamics in the development of discourses of gendered violence and the fundamental connection between the latter and the socio-political contexts in which they operate are highlighted as central methodological reflections offered by this work. Finally, the Introduction focuses on how the articles present in this volume can contribute to reaching the aims set out by the editors.

  PublisherDOI

• Writing with Light - Ambivalent: Photography and Visibility in African History Edited by Patricia Hayes and Gary Minkley. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2019. Pp. 376. $36.95, paperback (ISBN: 978-0-8214-2394-3); $90.00, hardcover (ISBN: 978-0-8214-2393-6).

  The Journal of African History · 2021

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • History
  • Art history

  Writing with Light - Ambivalent: Photography and Visibility in African History Edited by Patricia Hayes and Gary Minkley. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2019. Pp. 376. 90.00, hardcover (ISBN: 978-0-8214-2393-6). - Volume 62 Issue 3

  PublisherDOI

• Searching for the Origin(al)

  Cahiers d études africaines · 2018-01-01 · 4 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract This article offers an archaeology of one of the most popular and widely reproduced images across Senegal and its diaspora: the portrait of Amadou Bamba (1853-1927), founder of the Mouride Sufi Brotherhood. Seen as a powerful source of baraka or blessing, the black and white portrait can be spotted virtually everywhere in Mouride spaces from Touba to New York, from Dakar to Beijing. Despite its physical ubiquity, the photograph’s genesis remains shrouded in mystery. Building on two years of archival and field research in Senegal, this article seeks to reframe the significance of this iconic image by focusing on narratives of its origins. Taken between 1914 and 1916 to illustrate Paul Marty’s 1917 Études sur L’Islam au Sénégal, this portrait was one, among many others, that the colonial administration collected in an effort to monitor and document the activity of Senegal’s local Muslim leaders. In an attempt to bypass a Foucauldian view of photography, which reveals mechanisms of control and yet mutes the “Other,” this article also considers Mouride disciples’ accounts of this image’s history. Their analyses subvert monolithic interpretations of the portrait as an image of surveillance and render the instability of the photographic language, even when the colonizer is behind the camera.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Focus on "Urban Now" with Sammy Baloji & Filip De Boeck

  Lirias (KU Leuven) · 2016-11-02

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Focus on "Urban Now" with Sammy Baloji & Filip De Boeck Introduction by Z.S. Strother, Riggio Professor of African Art, Columbia, University Conversation with Sammy Baloji and Filip De Boeck moderated by Giulia Paoletti, co-curator of The Expanded Subject: New Perspectives in Photographic Portraiture from Africa. Screening of The Tower: A Concrete Utopia ( 2016) by Sammy Baloji & Filip De Boeck (1:10:19)

  PublisherOA PDF

• Photographic Portraiture in West Africa: Notes from “In and Out of the Studio”

  Metropolitan Museum Journal · 2016-01-01 · 3 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Un Nouveau Besoin: Photography and Portraiture in Senegal (1860-1960)

  Columbia Academic Commons (Columbia University) · 2015-01-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Senegal’s leading role in the development of African modernism in the 1960s is well known. Lesser-known is that, a century earlier, photography first arrived and took root in Senegal before circulating across French West Africa. This dissertation focuses on the genre of photographic portraiture in a country that did not have sculptural or masquerade traditions. It studies the ways in which photography accommodated and fostered new social and artistic practices and identities in Senegal between 1860—when the first studio opened in Saint Louis, the historical capital—and the 1960s, when photography became a “social imperative,” to use Geoffrey Batchen’s description (2001). The first chapter discusses cartes-de-visite commissioned as early as the 1860s by the first Senegalese patrons. In the course of this discussion, I challenge unilateral conceptions of photography as an apparatus of ideological control monopolized by the colonial authority. Chapter Two argues that Islam—the predominant religion in Senegal since the late nineteenth century—facilitated the popularity of the genre of portraiture through the circulation of devotional images in the form of lithographs, glass painting and photographs between the 1890s and 1920s. Chapter Three focuses on two photo series by amateur photographers from Saint Louis in the interwar period. I argue that these snapshots delineate the birth of a new subjectivity that neither mimicked French culture, nor conformed to Wolof customs. The last chapter juxtaposes the work of Mama Casset and Oumar Ka, two studio photographers working in the 1960s and 70s, in the capital and the rural interior of the country, respectively. In doing so I revisit the association between photography’s modernity and urban living, and propose that modernity can also be linked with “rural” tastes and styles. Rather than interpret it as either a “foreign” or “local” technology, this dissertation traces the fluctuations of photography’s significance in a dialectic relation with European, Islamic, American, African and Indian sources, revealing the nature of the medium as a multiplier of visions. Given Senegal's privileged status within La Grande France, this analysis will contribute to our understanding of the relationship between photography and modernity in Africa and beyond.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• 24. On George Osodi, Oil Rich Niger Delta (2003–7)

  2015-06-05

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• <b>When I Last Wrote to You About Africa</b>. Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto, Canada, October 2, 2010–January 2, 2011.

  African Arts · 2011-11-04

  articleSenior author
  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Lidia Luisa Zanetti Domingues

  University of Sheffield

  2 shared

• Yaëlle Biro

  1 shared

• Filip De Boeck

  1 shared

• Lorenzo Caravaggi

  1 shared

• Z. S. Strother

  1 shared

• Lorenzo Caravaggi

  Lancaster University

  1 shared

• Sammy Baloji

  1 shared

• Risham Majeed

  1 shared

Awards & honors

• 2024 Photography Network Book Award