Hala Auji

Hala Auji has an interdisciplinary background in graphic design, advertising, criticism and theory, and art history. She teaches courses on Islamic art, modern and contemporary art from Southwest Asia and North Africa (SWANA), and museum studies, connecting art, design, print culture, collecting, and book arts through a transregional lens spanning North America, Europe, and Asia. At the graduate level, her courses on museums and collections, exhibition history, and modern and contemporary SWANA art emphasize postcolonial and decolonial perspectives that challenge Eurocentrism while highlighting solidarity, transculturation, and intersectionality. At the undergraduate level, her classes span from the early centuries of Islam to the present, covering topics from calligraphy and book arts to painting, photography, and contemporary practice, and exploring how Orientalism and colonialism shaped categories such as modernity, the field of Islamic art, and distinctions between art, craft, and design.

With a wide-ranging and non-traditional background, Auji enjoys working with students who think creatively and critically about current debates and who want to push the boundaries of the discipline. Her areas of focus include intersectionality, design history and theory, museum studies, global art history, and nineteenth-century visual culture. She has advised projects on performance and display in museum spaces, the legacies of racism and colonialism in German ethnological museums, and the impact of user experience and interface design on how audiences engage with art. She also co-chairs the biennial Hamad bin Khalifa Symposium on Islamic Art, which has provided art history students with opportunities to attend and participate in events at VCUarts Qatar in Doha with expenses covered.

Her research focuses on transcultural modernity and contemporaneity through print culture, museum practices, and photography in the eastern Mediterranean during the long nineteenth century, as well as contemporary art from SWANA. She is the author of Printing Arab Modernity (2016), co-editor of The Arab Nahda as Popular Entertainment (2023) and Islamic Art History and the Global Turn (2026), and is currently writing a book on nineteenth-century printed portraiture.

She holds a PhD in Art History from Binghamton University (SUNY), an MA in Criticism and Theory from Art Center College of Design, and a BFA in Graphic Design from the American University of Beirut.