Julia Viebach

Julia is a Departmental Lecturer in African Studies at Oxford's African Studies Centre. Recently she completed a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship based in the Faculty of Law. Before that, Julia was a Development Career Lecturer and the Oxford Transitional Justice Research Fellow at Oxford's Centre for Criminology.

Julia obtained her doctorate from the University of Marburg. Her doctoral research explored how societies remember their past after mass violence and how they deal with this traumatic rupture evoked by violence through memorial practices. Focused on the case of Rwanda, her thesis is both a empirical enquiry into memorialisation and transitional justice in Rwanda as well as the development of a broader theoretical concept of how societies deal with an uncanny past.

Her recent Leverhulme project 'Atrocity's Archives: The Remnants of Transitional Justice' explores and compares the archival narratives of the Rwandan Gacaca Courts and those of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR). Julia's research is concerned with the ways narratives of the harm committed emerge and how the underlying assumptions of the Gacaca courts and the ICTR are addressed in the archival texts.