Julia works on African Politics and Development. Her research is about state-building, with a focus on how citizens’ understandings of the state are shaped by colonial legacies and international relationships. She is currently finishing an ERC project on African State Architecture. She teaches comparative politics and public policy. Julia worked at SOAS and Royal Holloway, both part of the University of London, before joining King’s in 2023.

Julia served as a specialist advisor to the House of Lords’ Inquiry into UK-Africa relations in 2019-20. She is a Visiting Scholar at the School of Architecture & Planning, University of Witwatersrand and Visiting Professor at the Johannesburg Institute for Advanced Study, University of Johannesburg; on the Editorial Boards of African Affairs and Africa Spectrum and the Advisory Board of the John and Elnora Ferguson Centre for African Studies, University of Bradford. She is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy.

Julia has worked as a science teacher in Zimbabwe, as a political journalist and editor, and for the UK government and a number of NGOs. She has a PhD in Politics and an MSc in Development Studies, both from SOAS, and a BSc in Physics from the University of Manchester.

Research

• African Politics and Development;
• State-building and State-Society relationships;
• Art, Architecture and Politics;
• Urban Politics;
• Art-based Research Methods.

Julia is interested in the development of political and social institutions in Africa. Her research explores how citizens understand and help make states, combining political, social, aesthetic and psychoanalytic theory with extensive fieldwork. She has written on UK-African relations, Images of Africa and Zimbabwean conceptions of the state in relation to the wider world. She is currently finishing an ERC-funded project about Architecture and the State in Côte d’Ivoire, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Ethiopia, Ghana and South Africa. Julia is particularly interested in urban politics and how politics is expressed through and shaped by architecture, art and fiction.

Teaching

Postgraduate

• 7YYDN011 Comparative Public Policy Analysis in Emerging Economies

PhD supervision

Julia is happy to supervise students writing their thesis on African Politics and Development.

She is currently supervising the following students:

• Emmanuel Ofori-Sarpong (SOAS, University of London)
• Gertrude Sai (SOAS, University of London).

She has previously supervised the following students: Lyn Johnstone, Langton Miriyoga, Simran Singh, Kuziwakwashe Zigomo, Michael Murphy, Emmanuel Siaw (Royal Holloway, University of London); Moudwe Daga, Innocent Batsani-Ncube, Kuukuwa Manful (SOAS, University of London).