Pauline Westerbarkey did their BA in Political Sciences at Sciences Po (France) and the George Washington University (US), an MA in International Affairs at the Graduate Institute Geneva (Switzerland), and an MA in Comparative Literature at SOAS University of London (UK) and has previously worked in international human rights advocacy, gender diversity and inclusion, communication and leadership training, research capacities and bookstores. In October 2022, they joined the Friedrich Schlegel Graduate School of Literary Studies and the Cluster of Excellence "Temporal Communities" where they work as a doctoral researcher in Research Area 3.

Current research includes an EXC 2020 doctoral research project, Visionary Futures: Exploring Utopia in Queer Speculative Fiction (2022-).