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.

From 2012 – 2015, Sundhya concurrently held a Research Chair in Law at SOAS, University of London, and in 2014, served as Director of Studies in Public International Law at the Hague Academy of International Law. She has held visiting appointments at the National University of Singapore, the London School of Economics and Political Science, New York University and the University of British Columbia. She currently serves as core faculty at the Harvard Law School Institute for Global Law and Policy Workshop, as Affiliate Faculty of the European Collaborative Doctoral Programme in Globalisation and Legal Theory, and holds Visiting Chairs at Birkbeck and SOAS.

Sundhya's published works include the books: Decolonising International Law: Development, Economic Growth and the Politics of Universality (Cambridge University Press, 2011), as well as the edited collections, International Law and the Cold War (Cambridge, 2019) (co-edited with Matthew Craven and Gerry Simpson), Reading Modern Law: Critical Methodologies and Sovereign Formations (Routledge, 2012) (co-edited with Ruth Buchanan and Stewart Motha), and Events: The Force of International Law (Routledge, 2011) (co-edited with Fleur Johns and Richard Joyce). Sundhya is currently co-editing The Oxford Handbook on International Law and Development (2021) with Ruth Buchanan and Luis Eslava, the Routledge Handbook on International Law and the Humanities (2020) with Shane Chalmers, and volume 12 of the multi volume Cambridge History of International Law, on International Law during the Cold War (2022) with Simpson and Craven.

Her current projects include: Lawful Interregnum a monograph arising from an Australian Research Council funded project on International Law and the Cold War (with Gerry Simpson and Matthew Craven) Invisible Leviathans, a large project on the history of the corporation in international law from the early modern period to the present day, and The Populist Challenge to International Law, in collaboration with Richard Joyce and Andrew Benjamin (Monash), Rose Parfitt (Kent) and James Martel (San Francisco State University) funded by the Australian Research Council in 2020.