She is a professor of Modern Culture and Media and the Department of Comparative Literature at Brown University and an independent curator of Archives and Exhibitions.

[2][3] Azoulay has degrees from Université Paris VIII, Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales and Tel Aviv University.

The theoretical framework she proposed have far-reaching implications in a number of knowledge fields, such as political theory, archival science, visual and photography studies.

In her book Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism (Verso, 2019), Azoulay studies historical objects (from photographs to documents) belonging to archives and museum collections.

[7] In her words: "Our approach to the archive cannot be guided by the imperial desire to unearth unknown ‘hidden’ moments (...) It should rather be driven by the conviction that other political species were and continue to be real options in our present.