Critical Theory and the School of Humanities present
The 2025-26 Wellek Lectures
Ariella Azoulay
Professor of Modern Culture and Media and the Department of Comparative Literature,
Brown University
May 19th-21st 2026
All lectures take place from 4:00-5:30 PM, May 19-21
Reception to follow after the first lecture.
Ariella Aïsha Azoulay currently chair d’excellence Habiter les ruines du monde Juif Musulman at Aix Marseille University, and Professor of Comparative Literature and Modern Culture and Media at Brown University where she teaches political theory from an anti-colonial perspective, using photography, craft and jewelry to study onto-epistemological violence perpetrated through institutions and technologies like museums, archives and nation states. Potential history and unlearning imperialism, developed in her 2019 book Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism (Verso Books) are key concepts and an approach that she has developed over more than a decade, concepts having far-reaching implications for the fields of political theory, archival formations, museum and photography studies. This is further developed in her two recent books The Jewelers of the ummah – Potential History of The Jewish Muslim World (Verso 2024) and Collaboration – A Potential History of Photography (co-edited with W. Ewald, S. Meiselas, L. Raiford, L. Wexler, T&H, 2023). A new edition of her 2012 book recently came out: Civil Imagination: The Political Ontology of Photography (Verso Books, 2024). She recently published her first children book Golden Threads (Ayin Press, 2024); Azoulay also published The Civil Contract of Photography (Zone Books, 2008) and From Palestine to Israel: A Photographic Record of Destruction and State Formation, 1947–1950 (Pluto Press, 2011). Azoulay is also a film essayist, and independent curator. Among her films: Palestine is there, where it had always been (20026); The trilogy: Unlearning Imperial Plunder : Un-documented (I, 2019); The world like a jewel in the hand (II, 2023), One Thousand and one jewels (III, 2025); and Civil Alliances, Palestine, 47–48 (2012). Among her exhibitions: Errata (Fundació Antoni Tàpies, Barcelona, 2019; HKW, Berlin, 2020), and The Natural History of Rape (Berlin Biennale, 2022).
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Parking information for the 2026 Wellek Lectures
Visitors to UCI can park in the Mesa Parking Structure and walk over to the Humanities Instructional Building and Humanities Gateway, following the directional signs. You will need to either purchase a permit from the kiosk attendant, or you can follow the instructions in the parking structure for general parking. Please click on the link for a PDF map.
Mesa Parking Structure and Humanities Buildings.pdf
The Wellek Library Lectures at UCI
Since 1981, the UCI School of Humanities / Critical Theory has sponsored an annual lecture series, named in honor of René Wellek (Yale University), whose library of works in critical theory is housed in the Langson Library Special Collections at the University of California, Irvine. Each year, we invite an internationally distinguished critical theorist to visit campus and deliver a series of three lectures that develops their critical position and relates it to the contemporary theoretical scene. Learn more about the Wellek Library Lectures.
Past Wellek Lectures are listed on this webpage. Each set of lectures is generally published in the Columbia University Press Wellek Library Lectures series.