Dr Richard Joyce
Dr Richard Joyce is a Senior Lecturer in the Faculty of Law at Monash University. His main research interests are in the history and theory of international law, with a particular focus on sovereignty, violence and responsibility. He draws extensively on continental philosophy and post-colonial theory.
He is the author of Competing Sovereignties (Routledge, 2013) and, with Professors Fleur Johns and Sundhya Pahuja, the editor of Events: The Force of International Law (Routledge, 2011). He is currently pursuing a major book project on the political theology of international law.
Prior to joining Monash he taught at Reading University, Birkbeck College, King’s College London and University College London. He currently serves as a member of the Global Faculty of the Institute for Global Law and Policy, Harvard Law School.
Professor Sundhya Pahuja
Sundhya Pahuja is the Director of Melbourne Law School’s Institute for International Law and the Humanities (IILAH). Her research focuses on the history, theory and practice of international law in both its political and economic dimensions.
She has a particular interest in international law and the relationship between North and South, and the practice, and praxis, of development and international law. Sundhya has been awarded the American Society of International Law Certificate of Merit (2012), the Woodward Medal for Excellence in the Humanities and Social Sciences (2014) and a Fulbright Senior Scholar award which she took up in 2016 at the Institute for Global Law and Policy at Harvard Law School.
In 2017 and 2019, Sundhya held a fellowship at the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Studies (STIAS) in South Africa, and in 2018, held the Genest Visiting Chair at Osgoode Hall law school in Toronto. Sundhya was invited to give the 2018 Lauterpacht Lectures at the University of Cambridge, the 2019 Newman Lecture at Yale Law School and the Douglas McK. Brown Lecture at UBC in 2020. In 2019, she was made a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Social Sciences.
Professor Andrew Benjamin
Professor Andrew Benjamin is one of the world’s leading political philosophers, with particular expertise in the work of Walter Benjamin and Hannah Arendt. He holds professorial appointments at Monash University and the University of Technology, Sydney.
He is the author of numerous works in political theory, architecture and aesthetics, including Working with Walter Benjamin: Recovering a Political Philosophy, (Edinburgh University Press, United Kingdom, 2013), Towards a Relational Ontology: Philosophy’s Other Possibility (State University of New York Press, United States, 2015); and Place, Commonality and Judgment: Continental Philosophy and the Ancient Greeks, Continuum International Publishing Group, 2013). This project is his sixth ARC award as Chief Investigator.
Dr Kojo Koram (from April 2022)
Dr Kojo Koram is a Senior Lecturer in Law at Birkbeck School of Law, University of London. He joined Birkbeck in September 2018. Prior to taking up this role, he was a Lecturer at the School of Law at the University of Essex between 2016-2018.
He was called to the Bar of England and Wales in 2011 and then received his PhD in 2017. In 2018, the Association for the Study of Law, Culture and the Humanities awarded his PhD the Julien Mezey Dissertation Award for the dissertation that most promises to enrich and advance interdisciplinary scholarship at the intersection of law, culture and the humanities.
In 2022, he published his debut book Uncommon Wealth: Britain and the Aftermath of Empire (John Murray 2022) which was nominated for the 2022 Orwell Prize for Political Writing.
Professor James Martel
James Martel is a professor in the Department of Political Science at San Francisco State University. He teaches courses in political theory, continental philosophy, anarchism, post colonial theory and theories of gender and sexuality.
Most recently, he has published Unburied Bodies: Subversive Corpses and the Authority of the Dead (Amherst College Press, 2018). Before that he published The Misinterpellated Subject (Duke University Press, 2017) and a trilogy of books on Walter Benjamin: The One and Only Law, Walter Benjamin and the Second Commandment (Michigan 2014), Divine Violence: Walter Benjamin and the Eschatology of Sovereignty (Routledge/GlassHouse 2011), and Textual Conspiracies: Walter Benjamin, Idolatry and Political Theory (Michigan, 2011). He is also the author of Subverting the Leviathan: Reading Thomas Hobbes as a Radical Democrat (Columbia, 2007) and Love is a Sweet Chain: Desire, Autonomy and Friendship in Liberal Political Theory (Routledge, 2001). He is also co-editor, along with Dr. Jimmy Casas Klausen (Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro) of How not to be Governed: Readings and Interpretations from a Critical Anarchist Left (Lexington, 2011). He has authored many essays, encyclopaedia entries, book chapters and book reviews. He has another book in the making entitled Disappointing Vision: Anarchist Prophecy and the Power of Unseeing.
Dr Rose Parfitt (October 2020 to December 2022)
Rose Parfitt is a Senior Lecturer in the Kent Law School. She has published widely in the fields of international law, legal history, critical theory and history of art, broadly speaking. Her first monograph, The Process of International Legal Reproduction: Historiography, Inequality, Resistance, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2019.
Dr Parfitt has been a member of the workshop teaching faculty at Harvard Law School’s Institute for Global Law and Policy (IGLP) since 2011, and has held visiting professorships at institutions including Melbourne Law School (Australia), Los Andes University (Colombia), Helsinki Law School (Finland), the University of Salento (Italy), Icesi (Colombia) and elsewhere.
She was awarded a Discovery Early Career Research Award (DECRA) by the Australian Research Council in 2015, and between 2016 and 2019 led a multi-year research project entitled ‘International Law and the Legacies of Fascist Internationalism’ while on secondment to Melbourne Law School. This work established foundational ideas on international law’s complicities and connections with fascism and the far right, many of which inform the work on this project.
Together with Luis Eslava (Kent Law School) and Markus Gunneflo (Lund), Dr Parfitt is the co-director of the ‘International Law and Politics’ Collaborative Research Network at the Law and Society Association (LSA), coordinating a programme of more than 45 events at the LSA’s annual meetings in the US, Mexico, Canada and elsewhere.