Paulina Banas - Nineteenth-Century Travel, Collaboration, and Orientalist Publishing on Egypt

This lecture will be hosted on Thursday, 18 December 2025 at 6:00 pm.

This talk discusses how nineteenth-century European travel and publishing industries shaped visual and cultural perceptions of Egypt and the Middle East.

Drawing on illustrations featuring Cairo and the Nile Valley, and the politics of collaboration among the various agents of this publishing world, such as the Dutch draughtsman Willem De Famars Testas and his employer, the French author Émile Prisse d’Avennes, Paulina Banas discusses the transforming image, market, and book industry on modern Egypt from the late 1830s to the late 1870s.

This approach, which traces the intersections of arts, commerce, and imperial power, reveals how the publishing world contributed to what we now recognize as the “citationary” character of Orientalist visual culture.

About the Speaker

Paulina Banas is an assistant professor of art history at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. Her research investigates the visual and material cultures of the cross-cultural encounters between Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa from the seventeenth century to the present. Originally from Poland, she holds a PhD from Binghamton University and an MA from Sorbonne University. Her recent 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.

Attention!

The lecture starts at 6 pm. The number of seats is limited and we work on a first-come, first-served basis. We open our doors at 5:30 and close them at 6:15 or earlier in case the lecture room reaches its full capacity.