Julia Erhart is a feminist film scholar and internationally recognised researcher on women’s screen practice, including women’s interventions into the industries of independent and commercial feature filmmaking. Julia’s sole-authored book, Gendering History on Screen: Women Filmmakers and Historical Films (IB Tauris/Bloomsbury 2018), examines innovations by women filmmakers in contemporary biopics, war films, documentaries, and movies about the “war on terror”. Julia’s most recent book is Gillian Armstrong: popular, sensual & ethical cinema (Edinburgh University Press 2020). She is currently completing research on how women negotiate the film industry after the age of 60.

A second prong of Julia’s research investigates the relationship between Australian cultural identities and screen production, particularly how Australasian media-makers shift the needle on conversations involving gender, race, sexuality, and belonging. Publications and developing research on this subject examine popular media-makers Chris Lilley, Gillian Armstrong, Jane Campion, Kate McCartney, Kate McLennan and the ground-breaking night-time soap Number 96 (1972-1977).

Julia has produced substantial research on the engagement with commercial media by LGBTIQ audiences. Articles by her on these subjects have appeared in numerous anthologies including Queer TV in the Twenty-First Century (McFarland, 2016), Invented Lives, Imagined Communities: Biopics and American National Identity (SUNY, 2016), Queer Love in Film and Television (Palgrave, 2013), and in journals which include Continuum, a/b: Auto/Biography, Screening the Past, Screen, and Camera Obscura.

Julia is the recipient of a grant from the Australian Academy of the Humanities and a fellowship from Fulbright. In 2016 Julia was co-leader of the Flinders Institute for Research in the Humanities annual research theme, “Technologies of Memory and Affect”.