Miriam Paeslack

Associate Professor

241 Center for the Arts

Phone: 716.645.0191

Email: paeslack@buffalo.edu

Research Interests: Paeslack's work and research are centered around the historical and socio-political relevance of creative and institutional practices – particularly in the visual arts and museums. She also investigates critical implications of urban and architectural representations and their relationship to cultural and social concepts of memory and identity. 

Courses:

Bio:

Miriam Paeslack is the author of Constructing Imperial Berlin: Photography and the Metropolis (University of Minnesota Press, 2018) on photography in fin-de-siècle Berlin; and editor of Ineffably Urban: Imaging Buffalo (Ashgate, 2013) on the visual experience and historic memorialization of Buffalo, NY. In her current book project, “Art Museums and the Engagement Paradigm,” Paeslack explores and critiques the evolving concept of “engagement” as practiced and theorized in artistic, cultural, historical and arts management discourses. She teaches courses related to museum management, engagement in the arts, and research in arts management. 

Her work is published in peer-reviewed journals including Future Anterior, the Journal of Architecture, and Fotogeschichte; edited volumes such as Curating Fascism: Exhibitions and Memory from the Fall of Mussolini to Today (“Contextualizing Razionalismo in the exhibition Photographic Recall (2019): Fascist Spaces in Contemporary German Photography”), edited by Sharon Hecker et al. (Bloomsbury, 2022), and independent publications such as America Recovered (“Taking Stock: Chad Ress’s Photographs of the Recovery Act.”) edited by Jordan Carver et al. (Actar, 2019), and Spaces of Uncertainty - Berlin Revisited (“Aesthetics of Reappearance.”) edited by Marcus Miessen et al. (Birkhäuser, 2018). Paeslack is the recipient of a Graham Foundation Publication Grant for the book project Constructing Imperial Berlin: Photography and the Metropolis (2015); and a grant of the Institute for Foreign Affairs (IFA), Germany for the exhibition “Photographic Recall: Italian Rationalist Architecture in Contemporary German Art,” (2018). Paeslack was trained as an art historian and historian of law in Germany, Italy and the United States. She is associate professor of arts management at the University at Buffalo (SUNY).