Research interests
Community archiving; audiovisual heritage; restitution; African history; archival methodologies; transitional justice; oral history; memory studies
Rose Miyonga
I am a postdoctoral researcher working on the Unhousing Restitution project. My research sits at the intersection of memory studies, post-colonial African history and decolonial archives and record keeping, and I am interested in how people make sense of their traumatic histories, and in decolonial archiving practices, legacies of empires and violence, public history-making, and transitional justice.
My current work explores questions of restitution in Ghanaian audiovisual heritage, focusing on creative responses to archival losses and decolonial approaches to the restitution of African curltural heritage.
My PhD thesis, defended in May 2026, examined the ways that individuals and communities in Kenya have remembered and kept records of their experiences Mau Mau war, in the context of public suppression and archival destruction. My work has been published in History Workshop Journal and the Journal of African History, and I have worked with museums and government bodies consulting on issues of memory and heritage in post-colonial Africa. I hold a Masters in Race and Resistance at the University of Leeds, and, prior to this, worked as a teacher in rural Kenya.
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Journal articles and special issues( ) Old wounds: embodying the Mau Mau war in post-colonial Kenya . Journal of Eastern African Studies 19 (4) 693–710( ) We Kept Them to Remember: Tin trunk archives and the emotional history of the Mau Mau war . History Workshop Journal 96 96–114
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Chapters( ) Legacies of the Mau Mau War in the Kenyan Landscape . In Saloul, I. and Baillie, B. The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Cultural Heritage and Conflict , Palgrave Macmillan
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Other publications( ) Colonial Afterlives: Land and the Emotional History of the Mau Mau War . The Funambulist 40