Academy Fellow

Professor Sundhya Pahuja is the Director of the Institute for International Law and the Humanities at Melbourne Law School. Her scholarship combines the study of the jurisprudence, history and theory of international law with the study of global encounters over time in order to provide a better understanding of the role of international law in both shaping and addressing unequal relationships between peoples. Her work has had a particular impact in the area of international law and development, and in the implications of the legacies of imperialism for contemporary institutional practice, and she regularly convenes policy and research streams in workshops led by the Harvard Institute for Global Law and Policy, in the US, Europe, Africa and the Middle East on global political economy and institutions in historical context. Her monograph, Decolonising International Law: Development, Economic Growth and the Politics of Universality (Cambridge University Press, 2011) was awarded the American Society of International Law Certificate of Merit (2012) and the Woodward Medal in the Humanities and Social Sciences (2014). Her more recent research centres on International Law and the Cold War (funded by the ARC and UK AHRC), and on the history of the corporation in international law. Sundhya has held several concurrent and visiting positions, including a Research Chair in Law at SOAS, University of London from 2011-2015, and a Visiting Professorship at the National University of Singapore in 2019. In 2014, she served as Director of Studies in Public International Law at the Hague Academy of International Law. In 2016 she was a Fulbright Senior Scholar at Harvard Law School. In 2018, she delivered the Lauterpacht Memorial lectures at Cambridge on ‘The Changing Place of the Corporation in International Law’, and held the Genest Global Chair at Osgoode Hall Law School in Canada. In 2019, Sundhya delivered the Newman Memorial lecture at Yale Law School, and held a fellowship at the Stellenbosch Institute of Advanced Study.

Director, Institute for International Law and the Humanities

Professorial Research Associate, SOAS, University of London

• Newman Lecturer, Yale University, 2019

• Lauterpacht Lecturer, University of Cambridge, 2018

• Fellow, Stellenbosch Institute of Advanced Studies, 2017, 2019

• Fulbright Senior Scholar, Harvard Law School, 2016

• Woodward Medal for the Humanities and Social Sciences, 2014

• Director of Studies in Public International Law, Hague Academy of International Law, 2014

• American Society of International Law Certificate of Merit, 2012

1. Matthew Craven, Sundhya Pahuja and Gerry Simpson (eds), International Law and the Cold War (CUP, 2020)

2. Sundhya Pahuja, Decolonising International Law: Development, Economic Growth and the Politics of Universality (CUP, 2011)

3. Sundhya Pahuja, “Corporations, Universalism and the Domestication of Race in International Law’ in Duncan Bell (ed) Empire, Race and Global Justice (CUP, 2019).

4. Luis Eslava and Sundhya Pahuja, ‘The Nation-State and International Law: A Reading from the Global South’ (2020) 11:1 Humanity

5. Sundhya Pahuja, ‘Laws of Encounter: A Jurisdictional Account of International Law’ (2013) 1(1) London Review of International Law.