Julia Barnes

Julia Barnes, PhD, is a cultural anthropologist whose research examines the use of humanitarian forensic anthropology and bioarchaeology in contexts of mass violence, human rights violations, and transitional justice. She has contributed to forensic investigations, exhumations, and genocide documentation in a multitude of global contexts, though her three major research sites are in Colombia (South America), Slovenia (Eastern Europe), and Cameroon (Central Africa). She studies how forensic investigations, exhumations, and processes of identification shape relationships among state institutions, scientific practitioners, victims’ families, and affected communities.

Degrees and Education

PhD, University of Virginia, 2022

Research Description

Dr. Barnes’s research program is organized around a comparative, multi-sited study of humanitarian forensic projects in Colombia, Cameroon, and Slovenia. From 2023 to 2026, she held a National Science Foundation Postdoctoral Research Fellowship, conducting research in partnership with Colombia’s National Institute of Legal Medicine and Forensic Sciences and the Forensic Anthropology Center at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, where her co-PI was Dr. Dawnie Steadman. Her work in Colombia examines how humanitarian forensic practices can be integrated with Indigenous and Afro-descendant mortuary traditions to develop more culturally responsive models of post-conflict repair. More broadly, this research shows how forensic science operates not only as a technical practice, but also as a site of ethical negotiation, governance, and social repair.

In 2025, Dr. Barnes received funding from the Humanitarian and Human Rights Resource Center of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences to lead a transnational project documenting evidence of colonial-era atrocities in Cameroon. Based primarily within Pittsburgh’s Cameroonian diaspora, the project is conducted in collaboration with La’akam, a Bamiléké victims’ advocacy organization with which she has worked since 2022. This research is featured in the International Museum of the Bamiléké Genocide, which opened in Wilkinsburg in April 2026. Her students contribute to testimony collection, archive development, and exhibit design.

Her earlier research in Slovenia examined state-led efforts to exhume and identify victims of extrajudicial mass killings committed during and after the Second World War. Between 2016 and 2022, she worked alongside the Slovenian Commission on Concealed Mass Graves and other participants in the country’s transitional justice process.

Together, these projects form the basis of her book, The Ethics of Forensic Anthropology and Bioarchaeology in Atrocity Contexts, under contract with Routledge. Drawing on nine years of doctoral and postdoctoral fieldwork across three continents, the book traces a continuum of engagement between forensic practitioners and post-atrocity communities: from state-driven exhumations conducted without community input in Slovenia, to government-mandated mediation with Indigenous groups in Colombia, to Dr. Barnes’s own role as a mediator in Cameroon.

Dr. Barnes has published in venues including Anthropology Now and has contributed to edited volumes on religion and conflict, with additional manuscripts in preparation. Her continuing research examines the cultural and political dimensions of forensic practice, with particular attention to how scientific infrastructures shape processes of justice and reconciliation. This work also informs her teaching, in which students use case-based analysis to examine anthropological approaches to science, inequality, and justice.

Courses

Field Methods (Cultural Anthropology)
Activist Anthropology
Anthropology of Gender and Sexuality