Julia Rensing is a postdoctoral researcher at the Centre for African Studies at the University of Basel, Switzerland. In her current research as part of the project “Inherited Futures? Objects, Time, Knowledge” she explores how material objects such as archival letters and photographs preserve and transport knowledges and how their meanings transform through circulation processes. She is also interested in the more abstract and immaterial dimensions of inheriting, which figure, for example, in inherited injustices and the archival formations of this. In her book “Troubling Archives: History and Memory in Namibian Literature and Art” Rensing engages more deeply with discourses on archives as sites of knowledge production and contestation. The book focuses on the role of photographic archives and explores how contemporary authors and artists from Namibia use photography as a way to make sense of the country’s complex colonial history. More broadly, Rensing is interested in how artistic practices shape discourses on (de)coloniality, inheritance, memory and imagined futures. She is also a member of the initiative Freiburg-Postkolonial, a research and educative project which promotes public debates about the colonial legacies of Freiburg and beyond.

“Tuli Mekondjo: Ancestral Spirits, Namibian Landscapes and Archival Photographs,” in Deep Time, Shallow Time. Kolonialzeitliche Fotografie in der Zeitgenössischen Kunst (working title), edited by Nanina Guyer, Leipzig: Spector Books, forthcoming 2026.

“‘Critical Intimacy’ in Nashilongweshipwe Mushaandja’s Tea-Time Performance Ondaanisa yo pOmudhime (Dance of the Rubber Tree),” in Live Archives: Namibian Contemporary Performance in Fragments, edited by Nashilongweshipwe Mushaandja and Nelago Shilongoh, Windhoek: Owela Live Arts Collective Trust, forthcoming 2026.

“On Opacity and Empathy: A Conversation with Tuli Mekondjo on Art Beyond Violence” in Contradictions of Looking, edited by Keely Shinners, special issue full-stop journal, forthcoming fall 2025. 

With Sitaara Stodel. 2025. “Overwhelming Inheritance: Family Pictures in Sitaara Stodel’s Photo-Collages.” Safundi, November, 1–15. doi:10.1080/17533171.2025.2565030.

Troubling Archives. History and Memory in Namibian Literature and Art, Bielefeld: transcript Verlag, 2025.

With Coletta Kandemiri: “Imaginations and Constructions of Literary Spaces: The Lower !Garib/ Orange River Region in Literature“ in: The Lower !Garib – Orange River. Pasts and Presents of a Southern African Border Region, edited by Luregn Lenggenhager, Martha Akawa, Giorgio Miescher, Romie Nghitevelekwa, Ndidzulafhi Innocent Sinthumule, Bielefeld: transcript, 2023, pp. 65-78.

“Contested Memories and Spaces: Art, Archives, and Ambivalence in ‘Ovizire ∙ Somgu: From Where Do We Speak?’” in: Curating Transcultural Spaces: Post-Colonial Conflicts in Museological Perspectives, edited by Sarah Hegenbart, London: bloomsbury, 2023, pp. 109-130. 

Lost Libraries, Burnt Archives, edited by Sindi-Leigh McBride and Julia Rensing, Cape Town: Michaelis Galleries, 2023. 

“Lost or Found: Reckoning with Archival Ruins” in: Lost Libraries, Burnt Archives, edited by Sindi-Leigh McBride and Julia Rensing, Cape Town: Michaelis Galleries, 2023, pp. 60-85.

“‘Ovizire ∙ Somgu: From Where Do We Speak’ (2018-2020): Artistic Interventions in the Namibian Colonial Archive (2018–2020).” Journal of Southern African Studies 48, no. 1 (January 2022): 81–102.

Sites of Contestation. Encounters with the Ernst and Ruth Dammann Collection in the Archives of the Basler Afrika Bibliographien, edited by Julia Rensing, Lorena Rizzo and Wanda Rutishauser, Basel: Basler Afrika Bibliographien, 2021.

“Worlds Apart? Biographies and Interventions in the Dammann Collection” in: Sites of Contestation. Encounters with the Ernst and Ruth Dammann Collection in the Archives of the Basler Afrika Bibliographien, edited by Julia Rensing, Lorena Rizzo and Wanda Rutishauser, Basel: Basler Afrika Bibliographien, 2021, pp. 29-54.

“Fest auf dem Sockel. Der Schädelsammler Alexander Ecker wird in Freiburg noch immer geehrt“ in: iz3w:Informationszentrum Dritte Welt, volume 381, Freiburg, November/December 2020, pp. 14-16.