Julie MacArthur

Biography

Dr. Julie MacArthur is an assistant professor at the University of Toronto. Her research interests include cartography and geographic imaginations, borders and local practices of space, anti-colonialism, memory and visual representation in constructions of community, power, and dissent in modern Africa. She is the author of Cartography and the Political Imagination: Mapping Community in Colonial Kenya (Athens, 2016) and the editor of Dedan Kimathi on Trial: Colonial Justice and Popular Memory in Kenya’s Mau Mau Rebellion (Athens, 2017). She has also published on electoral politics, linguistic history, and the making of political communities. She is currently working on a project entitled Radical Cartographies that examines alternative mappings of decolonization, sovereignty, and citizenship across eastern Africa, 1950-1976. Most recently, she published “Decolonizing Sovereignty: States of Exception along the Kenya-Somali Frontier” with the American Historical Review.

She also works extensively in African cinema, both as a scholar and curator. Her project, African Cinema and the Historical Imagination, explores film as a central technology through which Africans compose, consolidate, and experience their pasts, and engage with pressing social, political, and aesthetic concerns in contemporary Africa. She has worked as a programming associate with the Toronto International Film Festival and Film Africa in London as well as serving as the Director of the Cambridge African Film Festival for several years. She previously served as the Director of Content Acquisition for Buni.TV, an online platform for the distribution of African content, and she regularly curates film programs and participates in film forums across the world.