Julia is a social anthropologist specialising in material culture studies, critical museology and heritage studies. She has worked in numerous transdisciplinary settings, including art, historical and ethnological museums, and with a variety of stakeholders from academia, art, activism and cultural heritage communities, bringing their numerous forms of knowing about pasts, presents and futures into dialogue. She currently works as a provenance researcher at the Zentralarchiv/ Ethnologisches Museum, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin where she leads the collaborative research project “Confronting Colonial Pasts, Envisioning Creative Futures” into the collections from Namibia. The exhibition about the project at the Humboldt Forum (2021) explores new modes of collaboratively curating collections from colonial contexts. In the exhibition “The Blind Spot. Bremen, Colonialism and Art” (2017) at the Kunsthalle Bremen, Julia traced the colonial entanglements of the European art museum and discussed the legacies of racializing and exoticising imagery in Modern art. For her DPhil at the University of Oxford, she collaborated with a Nigerian diaspora organization in London to investigate a collection of colonial war booty at the National Maritime Museum, rewriting histories of transatlantic trade, cultural exchange, and memory in the Niger Delta. Julia has been teaching at the University of Vienna since 2009. She was appointed member of the Genshagener Kreis in 2022. Her publications include “macht II beziehungen. Ein Begleitheft zur Provenienzforschung im Humboldt Forum” (with Howald, Labischinski, Sporleder, Weber-Sinn, 2021), „Beyond Exhibiting the Experience of Empire? Challenging Chronotopes in the Museum,” Third Text (2019), and „Unruly Voices in the Museum. Multisensory engagement with disquieting histories,” The Senses and Society (2014).
