Dr. Julie MacArthur (co-curator and series lead): Julie MacArthur is an Associate Professor of African History at the University of Toronto. Her research interests revolve around the role of cartography and geographic imaginations; mobility, borders and Indigenous practices of space; decolonization, liberation movements, and alternative sovereignties; film and visual culture; and the roles of memory and representation in constructions of community, power, and dissent in modern Africa. She has published two award-winning books, Cartography and the Political Imagination (2016) and Dedan Kimathi on Trial (2017) as well as several articles in leading journals and public-facing platforms. Dr. MacArthur has also worked extensively in the field of African cinema, both as a curator and scholar, exploring film as a central technology through which Africans compose, edit and consolidate their pasts, and as a means to express and engage with pressing social and political concerns in contemporary Africa. She is currently principal investigator on a multi-year, SSHRC-funded project entitled "Forest Rebels" that combines her work on liberation movements and decolonial practice with her experience working in research-creation methodologies and African cinema.
Dr. Alison MacAulay (co-curator and series manager): Alison MacAulay is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow in Historical Studies at the University of Toronto Mississauga. Her research focuses on the intersections of visual culture, research methods, and history, with her current project focusing on uses of archival materials in cinemas of genocide. Her PhD dissertation, “Filming History: Visual Representations of Rwanda, 1916-2014” was awarded the 2023 John Bullen Prize by the Canadian Historical Association. She teaches undergraduate courses on histories of film, Rwandan history, and genocide studies. Alison is also an executive producer on a number of feature, short, and documentary projects.
Emily Mann (Series Assistant): Emily Mann is a History MA student at the University of Toronto. Her research focuses on Namibian history in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries and, specifically, on the relationship between narratives of "official" history, public memory, and spatiality in Windhoek's urban landscape.
Maggie Roberts (Series Assistant): Maggie Roberts is a PhD candidate at the University of Toronto’s Cinema Studies Institute. Her work traces the link between cinematic representations of sex and violence under a feminist theoretical model. Her research is particularly focused on applying a decolonial lens to French feminist film, in order to uncover how the spectre of colonial violence is inextricable from gendered liberation. Maggie’s dissertation analyzes the films of Catherine Breillat and articulates how violence can be repurposed as a feminist reading mode which is made legible through film’s spatial and environmental properties. She is thrilled to join the What Remains team for our screening series this January.
Joy Xu (Volunteer): Joy is a fourth-year undergraduate student in History, Cinema Studies, and English, whose work sits at the intersection of film production, visual culture, and historical research, with particular interests in everyday material culture, nostalgia, and food studies. Her academic research focuses on twentieth-century Chinese social history, domesticity, and visual propaganda, and she is currently completing an honours thesis on gendered portrayals of communal dining during Maoist China. Her academic work deeply informs her film practice as a freelance Production Designer and Set Dresser, and vice versa, she adopts the same creativity used to characterize sets in her research.
Sophie Zhang (Graphic Designer): Sophie Zhang is a second-year Cinema Studies and Philosophy student at the University of Toronto. As the graphic designer for What Remains, she draws on a deep love for both film and design, aiming to translate the series’ themes of reclamation and embodied histories into a visual language that resonates across audiences.