Paeslack's work and research are centered around the historical and socio-political relevance of creative and institutional practices – particularly in the visual arts and museums. She also investigates critical implications of urban and architectural representations and their relationship to cultural and social concepts of memory and identity. 

Miriam Paeslack is an art historian whose interdisciplinary research explores how experiences, emotions, and memories determine and are shaped by the modern city. She is the author of Constructing Imperial Berlin: Photography and the Metropolis (University of Minnesota Press, 2018) and the editor of Ineffably Urban: Imaging Buffalo (Ashgate, 2013). Both books examine urban experiences in specific geographic and historically determined contexts.

Her more recent work turns to the curatorial and institutional dimensions of artistic and cultural engagement. Her essay “Contextualizing Razionalismo in the exhibition Photographic Recall (2019): Fascist Spaces in Contemporary German Photography,” in the volume Curating Fascism: Exhibitions and Memory from the Fall of Mussolini to Today (Bloomsbury, 2022), scrutinizes the conditionality of curatorial engagement and communication. Her framing and introduction of the special issue “Art Engagement and the Non-Visitor” (The Journal of Cultural Management and Cultural Policy, 2024) argues for an open and comparative approach to cultural engagement strategies in the US and Germany.

Paeslack is currently part of the multi-year international research project Mediating Urban Emotions: Space, Feeling, and the Modern City, which, through publications and site-specific knowledge sharing and interventions, explores how emotions become spatialized, visualized, circulated, and contested through representations of the modern city. Her writing has appeared in peer-reviewed journals, including Architectural Histories, Future Anterior, the Journal of Architecture, and Fotogeschichte, as well as in edited volumes such as Post-Conflict Performance, Film, and Visual Arts: Cities of Memory (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016) and Spatial Turns: Space, Place, and Mobility in German Literary and Visual Culture (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2010).

Paeslack is the recipient of grants from the Graham Foundation, Germany’s Institute for Foreign Cultural Relations (IFA), and the German Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation. She received her Doctor of Philosophy from the University of Freiburg, Germany (art history/history of public and civil law). Before joining the faculty at UB, she taught modern art and photo history and theory at the California College of the Arts (San Francisco) and the Academy of Visual Arts in Leipzig, Germany.