Assistant Professor of Art History
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AEIVA 227
(205) 934-4942

Education:

• B.A., M.A., Sorbonne Université
• Ph.D., Binghamton University

Areas of Specialization: 19th-century visual culture; Islamic art and architecture; Orientalism; material culture; illustration and design history; art and travel; modern Egyptian art, architecture, and urbanism.

Originally from Poland, Paulina is an art historian whose research has focused on the visual and material cultures of the cross-cultural encounters between Europe and the Middle East (17th-present).

Her book, Visualizing Egypt: European Travel, Book Publishing, and the Commercialization of the Middle East in the Nineteenth Century, was published by the American University in Cairo Press in 2025. By examining the production and dissemination of 19th-century French and British illustrated albums featuring Egyptian people and Cairo’s Islamic architecture, the book discusses how European travel and publishing industries shaped visual and cultural perceptions of Egypt and the Middle East.

Paulina’s research has been supported by the Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture at Harvard University, Huntington Library, Bibliographical Society of America, Historians of Islamic Art Association, and the Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona. Her writing also appeared in Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide, the exhibition catalogue The Fascination of Persia: Persian European Dialogue in Seventeenth-Century Art and Contemporary Art of Teheran, and the edited volume Pious Pilgrims, Discerning Travellers, Curious Tourists: Changing Patterns of Travel to the Middle East from Medieval to Modern Times.

Before coming to UAB, Paulina worked as a Postdoctoral Associate at the Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture at Harvard University, Visiting Assistant Professor at Sam Houston State University, and a Postdoctoral Fellow and Faculty Member at the Maryland Institute College of Art.

Her teaching includes subjects on the arts of the Islamic world, Africa, 19th-century European visual culture, modern European and Arab art, history of travel, and illustration history, taught in the larger global and technological context.