Dr Kathleen Birrell is a McKenzie Postdoctoral Fellow at Melbourne Law School. Her postdoctoral project is focused on encounters between juridical, political and cultural narratives in the context of climate change.
Her research adopts critical legal methodologies to consider the limits and possibilities of rights and obligations and encounters between laws in the context of the Anthropocene thesis.
Her research is strongly interdisciplinary, encompassing environmental and climate change law, rights law, property law and native title, and intersects with Indigenous jurisprudences, literature and the environmental humanities.
Kathleen is the author of Indigeneity: Before and Beyond the Law (Routledge, 2016). This book examines contested notions of indigeneity, the troubled juxtaposition of law and justice in the context of Indigenous legal claims and literary expressions, the contested history and jurisprudence of native title, international and national discourses of rights and recognition, postcolonialism and resistance in ‘settler’ nation states, and the mutually constitutive relation between law and literature.
Kathleen completed a PhD (Law) at Birkbeck, University of London, under the supervision of Professor Peter Fitzpatrick, and an LLB (Hons), BA (Hons) and Graduate Diploma in Arts (English Literature) at The University of Melbourne. She has taught at Birkbeck, University of London, and The University of Melbourne. Prior to entering academia, she worked at a leading Australian commercial law firm, specialising in environmental, property and native title law.
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Kathleen Birrell's highlights
FEATURED Journal article
Book Review: Colonial Lives of Property: Law, Land, and Racial Regimes of Ownership
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Projects
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Project Types
1
Internal Research Grant
Scholarly Works
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Honours, Awards and Fellowships
McKenzie Postdoctoral Fellowship (University of Melbourne)
Credentials
Positions
Mckenzie Postdoctoral Fellowship
Law
Education
Doctor of Philosophy
University of London
Bachelor of Laws
University of Melbourne
Bachelor of Arts
University of Melbourne
Graduate Diploma Arts (English Literature)
University of Melbourne