Paula V. Kupfer is a Teaching Assistant Professor in the Department of the History of Art and Architecture and the College of General Studies, offering in-person and online courses on the history of photography, the intersections of art and politics in modern Latin America, the long history of viral and circulating images, and reparative histories of art and architecture.
Kupfer’s courses frame art history and visual culture as an invitation to think with and embrace complexity, situating artworks as objects that crystallize multiple political, environmental, and cultural contexts while mediating aesthetic languages, material possibilities, and ideas of beauty.
Kupfer’s research focuses on the development of a transatlantic photographic visual culture of tropicality across geographic, environmental, and political scenarios across the Americas. Her book project, Imperial Ecologies: Photography, Race, and the Idea of Nature in Nineteenth-Century Brazil, reframes nineteenth-century photographs of natural and man-made landscapes in Rio de Janeiro through the lens of race and environmental history. A second project, Reframing the Panama Canal: Photography, Contemporary Art, and the Afterlives of Empire, investigates how historical photographs, postcards, and contemporary art have shaped the history and memory of the Panama Canal and the US Canal Zone in Panama and beyond.
Kupfer maintains an active publication practice related to photography, in which she centers the ways race, gender, and class condition artists’ identities and shape the history of the medium. She has collaborated on a number of recent publications that highlight the contributions of women and Black photographers: Sandra Eleta: The Invisible World (2018); What They Saw: Historical Photobooks by Women, 1843–1999 (2021); A World History of Women Photographers (2022); and Black Photojournalism (2025). Before joining HAA, Kupfer worked as managing editor of Aperture magazine, as photo editor for California Sunday Magazine, and as freelance editor on various books and exhibition catalogues.
Areas of Specialization
History of photography; modern and contemporary art in Latin America; ecocriticism
- PhD, History of Art and Architecture, University of Pittsburgh, 2024
- MA, Art History, Hunter College, New York, 2016 (MA thesis: “Gertrudes Altschul and the Foto Cine Clube Bandeirante: Modern Photography and Femininity in 1950s São Paulo” )
- BA, Journalism and Latin American Studies, College of Arts and Sciences, New York University, 2009 (cum laude; BA Honors thesis: “Contesting City Spaces: Public Art in Bogotá”)
Education & Training
- Finalist, with Rose Marie Cromwell, LUMA Rencontres Dummy Book Award, Rencontres d’Arles Photography Festival, France, for the collaborative artist-book project King of Fish (2025)
- Andrew W. Mellon Predoctoral Fellowship, University of Pittsburgh (2022–23)
- Photography Network Project Grant (2022)
- Mellon International Dissertation Research Fellowship, Social Sciences Research Council, Brooklyn, New York (2021–22)
- Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst (DAAD) Research Fellowship and Guest-Researcher at Ibero-Amerikanisches Institut, Berlin (2021)
“Hands in the Game: Donna Conlon and Jonathan Harker’s Playful Collaborations in Panama,” in Unserious Ecocriticism: Play, Humor, and Environmental Destruction in Contemporary Art and Visual Culture, eds. Jessica Landau and Maria Lux (Amherst College Press, 2026), 113–122.
“Variations on Landscape, Environment, and History: Lola Álvarez Bravo’s Paisajes de México (1954).” Dialectic: The Journal of the School of Architecture of the University of Utah, no. 10, Decarbonizing Design / Mobilizing Agency (2022): 9–24.
“Al rodar los mangos / As the Mangoes Roll,” in Al rodar los mangos: De las fructíferas colaboraciones entre Donna Conlon y Jonathan Harker / As the Mangoes Roll: On the Fruitful Collaborations of Donna Conlon and Jonathan Harker (Panama City, Panama: Casa Santa Ana, 2026), 10–39; 134–159.
“1965–1969: Nostalgia, Pop, and Revolution,” in What They Saw: Historical Photobooks by Women, 1843–1999, eds. Russet Lederman and Olga Yatskevich (New York: 10x10 Photobooks, 2021), 145–69. Winner of the 2021 Aperture–Paris Photography Catalog of the Year Award and the 2022 Kraszna-Krausz Photography Book Award
“Gertrudes Altschul and the Elements of a (Brazilian) Landscape,” in Gertrudes Altschul: Filigree, eds. Adriano Pedrosa and Tomás Toledo (São Paulo: Museu de Arte de São Paulo, 2021), 76–88.
“Charles ‘Teenie’ Harris & W. Eugene Smith in Pittsburgh,” in Dispatch: Carnegie International, 57th Edition 2018, eds. Liz Park and Ingrid Schaffner (Pittsburgh: Carnegie Museum of Art, 2019), 120–22.
