• BA in Art History, Vassar College
• MA in Visual and Critical Studies, California College of the Arts
• Ph.D. in Visual and Cultural Studies, University of Rochester

Golonu’s research interests include Ottoman art and visual culture, modern and contemporary art from Türkiye, art and ecology, and photographic histories of the Middle East. She is completing her first monograph, Modernizing Nature and Naturalizing Modernization, Urban Greenspace and Cultural Memory in Late Ottoman Istanbul, which traces changing concepts of urban public space in the Ottoman capital during the long nineteenth century. Sections of this research have been published in the edited volume Commoning the City: Empirical Perspectives on Urban Ecology, Economics and Ethics (Routledge, 2020) and Infrastructures and Society in (Post) Ottoman Geographies (Forum Transregionale Studien, 2021). Golonu’s peer reviewed research articles have appeared in publications such as Third Text and the Journal of Visual Culture, and her art criticism has been published in art journals worldwide, including Artforum, Art in America, Aperture, Modern Painters and frieze. Along with Candice Hopkins and Marisa Jahn, she is the co-editor and co-writer of the volume Recipes for an Encounter (Western Front Editions, 2010). From 2003-2008, Golonu served as a curator of contemporary art at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco where she worked on more than thirty solo and group exhibitions.

• “At the Cross-roads: Photography, Ecology and Heritage in Istanbul.” Journal of Visual Culture (April 2024) https://doi.org/10.1177/14704129241238380
  
• “Cultivating Flowers and Loyal Subjects: A Case Study of the Işkodra Municipal Garden.” In Infrastructures and Society in (Post-)Ottoman Geographies, edited by Ilkay Yılmaz. TRAFO – Blog for Transregional Research (June 2021).
• “From Graveyards to the ‘People’s Gardens’: the Making of Public Leisure Space in Istanbul.” In Commoning the City: Empirical Perspectives on Urban Ecology, edited by Derya Özkan and Güldem Büyüksaraç. London: Routledge, 2020.
• “Images with a second life: photographs of the Hüdavendigâr Province that became landscape paintings.” In Ottoman Arcadia, The Hamidian Expedition to the Land of Tribal Roots (1886), edited by Bahattin Öztuncay and Özge Ertem, 107-121. Istanbul: Koç University Research Center for Anatolian Civilizations, 2018.

• UB Humanities Institute Faculty Fellowship, 2023-2024
• Post-Doctoral Fellowship in the History of Art, Getty/ACLS, 2022
• Post-Doctoral Research Grant, Institute of Turkish Studies, 2020
• Post-doctoral Fellowship, ARIT/National Endowment for the Humanities, 2019
• Grabar Post-doctoral Fellowship, Historians of Islamic Art Association, 2019
• Leibniz Fellowship for Historical Authenticity, Zentrum Moderner Orient, 2018

• VS 521: Intro to Critical Theory
• VS/AHI 470: Global Modernisms
• AHI 395: Contemporary Art
• AHI 207: Arts of the Islamic World