Hi, I’m Julia
I’m an author and academic based in London, UK, and currently working as a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in Performance and Politics at the University of Warwick. Prior to this post, I lectured at Goldsmiths, University of London; the Royal Central School for Speech and Drama; and the University of Surrey, where I was also awarded my PhD in 2019.
My academic work addresses questions of political representation, democracy, and performance – particularly in the context of the U.S. presidency and in Anglo-American relations.
My first book, Performance, Theatricality and the U.S. Presidency: The Currency of Distrust, focuses on distrust and the erosion of legitimacy under mainstreamed populism, U.S. presidential performance (with a particular focus on presidents since Watergate) as well as representative democracy more broadly.
My current research aims to expand this work to international relations between states by investigating myths of the so-called ‘special relationship between the US and the UK.
Current Research
Performing Anglo-Americans Relations: Exceptionalism, Myth, Identity
Through a focus on political speech, this Leverhulme-Trust-funded project offers the first major study of the performative dimension of Anglo-American relations. The ambition motivating my current research is to develop an international relations perspective for the emerging field of politics and performance research.
Introducing an interdisciplinary methodology that combines archival research and performance analysis, this work examines how key events in US-UK relations – from the Declaration of Independence via the Suez Crisis to the Reagan/Thatcher years and beyond – have been staged in political oratory and its mediatised dissemination. I seek to capture how performance has helped to create the so-called ‘special relationship’ as a powerful source of political identification on either side of the Atlantic. The project will trace how performances of Anglo-American relations have constructed an enduring political imaginary of Western exceptionalism that has shaped the order of the modern world, in spite of shifting power imbalances.
research interests