Author of Civil Imagination: The Political Ontology of Photography (Verso, 2012) and The Civil Contract of Photography (MIT Press, 2008), Ariella Azoulay focuses her research on how history is told through visual mediums — photographs, film, drawings, and other visual elements — and how these provide a level of detail and context not provided solely by the written word. In her lecture at the Yale School of Art, Azoulay will use the 1950s text A Woman in Berlin as a point of departure for tracing the visual record of a massive rape that took place at the end of World War II, creating a key to read certain photographs previously overlooked as related to rape. Ariella Azoulay is Professor of Modern Culture and Media and Comparative Literature at Brown University.