I am an Associate Professor in Political Studies at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa. I hold a DPhil in Modern History from the University of Oxford, and completed my earlier studies at the University of Natal (now the University of KwaZulu-Natal) in Durban.

My academic writing revolves around a set of interconnected themes. I have written primarily on the emergence of new forms of popular protest outside of institutional and organisational frameworks in South Africa - both during the apartheid era, and in today's contemporary post-apartheid world. I have also written on the relationship between courts, the law, legal discourse and popular political struggles.

Much of this work is bound together by a concern with the ways in which equality - and, in particular, equality of understanding - is assumed, asserted, and recognised. In my work, both popular politics and the courtroom struggles of the poor and marginalised are considered through the lens of a politics and a practice of equality. This assumption of equality - it seems to me, at least - must be the basis of any truly radical politics.

My teaching is also concerned with similar issues. Since 2015, my core undergraduate teaching has focussed on the relationships between Law, the State, and Society. I also regularly teach South African Politics and Governance to undergraduate students. At a graduate level, I teach an introductory Research Methods course and a course on the Politics of Utopia. 

I supervise students on a wide range of topics. I have PhD students working on the politics of mining, and its impact on the formation of communities in South Africa's highveld provinces, on Coloured identity and politics in post-apartheid South Africa, on treason trials and the politics of ‘spontaneity’ in the late apartheid period, and on the role of material culture in the construction of Basotho national identity. At Masters level, my students have examined popular protests, the logic behind social grant provision, the politics of Commissions of Inquiry, the political subjectivities of domestic workers, the experiences of short term imprisonment for activists and migrants in South Africa, and the practices of customary law adjudication in contemporary rural South Africa.

I can be found on Twitter @julianbrownSA.