Julia works on African Politics and Development. Her research is about state- and democracy-building, with a focus on how citizens’ understandings of the state are shaped by colonial legacies and international relationships. She has recently finished work on an ERC project about African State Architecture and her new book, State-Building: Architecture and Authority in Africa will be published in 2026. She is co-convenor of the Democracy and Development Research Group in DID.

Julia worked at SOAS and Royal Holloway, both part of the University of London, before joining King’s in 2023. She 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’s new research project explores how ideas and histories of independence are expressed through and shaped by art and fiction.

Teaching

Postgraduate

• 7YYDN011 Making Public Policy in the Global South
• 7YYDW001 Foundations of Development Theory and Management

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)
• Francis Davis
• Gertrude Sai