Hala Auji

Hala Auji is an associate professor of Art History and the Hamad bin Khalifa Endowed Chair for Islamic Art. Informed by her interdisciplinary background in graphic design, criticism and theory, and art history, Auji’s research explores the history of the book, print culture, cultural modernity, museum practices, and portraiture in the Islamic world, with a focus on Arabic-speaking communities of the Eastern Mediterranean. Her work evidences intersections between book history, manuscript studies, art history, design history, comparative literature, and Islamic and Middle East studies. She is the author of Printing Arab Modernity: Book Culture and the American Press in Nineteenth-Century Beirut (Brill, 2016). Her publications have appeared in various journals such as the Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication, Visible Language, and Bulletin de correspondence hellénique – modern et contemporaine. At VCU, Auji teaches graduate and undergraduate courses on the material culture, design, art, architecture, and exhibition history of, and about, the Middle East and wider Islamic world. Before joining VCUArts, she served as an associate professor of Islamic art at the American University of Beirut, Lebanon. Her research has been supported by fellowships from the Forum Transregionale Studien (Berlin), the Houghton Library (Harvard), and the College Art Association. She is currently an editorial board member of the journal Art in Translation and serves as an Assistant Editor for the International Journal of Islamic Architecture. Auji received her PhD in Art History from Binghamton University, State University of New York. She holds an MA in Criticism and Theory from Art Center College of Design (Pasadena) and a BFA in Graphic Design from the American University of Beirut.