Prior to her appointment at Columbia University, Bahrani taught at the
University of Vienna in
Austria,
State University of New York at Stony Brook, and was a curator in the
Metropolitan Museum of Art's Near Eastern Antiquities Department from 1989 to 1992. She was
Slade Professor of Fine Art at the
University of Oxford for 2010–11. On May 25, 2004, Bahrani was appointed to work with the
Coalition Provisional Authority as Senior Consultant for Culture. She stated that her objective was to continue the reconstruction of the Iraq National Museum and the Iraq National Library. She also worked to restore documents to the National Archives of Iraq. Bahrani has written widely on ancient near eastern art. Her book
The Infinite Image was described by
Matthew Canepa as a tool for "advocacy of the relevance of ancient Near Eastern art to contemporary art historical discourse, programs, and museums". In
Scramble for the Past, edited by Bahrani, she also wrote a chapter which described how Ottoman and European colonial powers used the Assyrian past to meet their own "ideological goals". In reviewing
The Graven Image archaeologist
Jeremy Tanner described how Bahrani's book demonstrated "a complete overturning of Eurocentric representations of the cultural and artistic legacies of ancient Assyria and Babylonia", compounding the notion that the idea of 'Mesopotamia' itself is a colonial product. Bahrani's book
The Ritual Body was reviewed by
Carolyn Nakamura, who described it as "an illuminating and theoretically rich consideration of Assyro-Babylonian war and violence". == Awards and recognition ==