Dr Ann-Sophie Levidis

Overview

Dr Ann-Sophie Levidis is a McKenzie Fellow at Melbourne Law School and a legal historian specialising in international law, environmental justice, and the evolving relationship between law, science and technology in the twentieth century. Her research examines how international legal institutions grappled with the environmental challenges of the nuclear age, mediating claims by scientists, activists, and Indigenous communities, and with radiation and generational harm to bodies and the environment.

Her first book, Trials of Empire: France, War Crimes and the End of Colonial Rule in Asia, forthcoming with Cambridge University Press, examines the political and juridical uses of war crimes trials in Indochina and France’s effort to use law to re-establish and reinforce its faltering republican and imperial authority. Moving between Saigon, Tokyo, Paris, and Geneva, the book offers a new global history of war crimes trials that reopens the contentious relationship between war crimes and colonialism as France’s empire came violently apart.

Her current research project, Un-Endings: Nuclear Afterlives and Decolonisation in the Pacific, examines French nuclear testing in the Pacific as a history of law, environmental violence, and the competing legal claims and struggles among environmental activists, scientists, and Indigenous groups, whom the era of decolonisation forgot. The project reopens the violent archives of nuclear testing in the Pacific, ranging from the bombing of the Rainbow Warrior to anti-nuclear and decolonial violence that has wracked the French Pacific from the 1980s to the present.

Her publications cover imperial sovereignty, legal pluralism, war crimes, and decolonisation, with articles in the Journal of the History of International Law and contributions to edited volumes on international law and global order, including the Cambridge History of International Law. She has held fellowships and research appointments at Harvard University, Kyoto University, the Leibniz Institute of European History, the Institute for Advanced Study, Konstanz, and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Her research has received several international distinctions, including the Jean-Baptiste Duroselle Prize in the history of international relations and the SHAFR Global Scholars and Diversity Grant.

Before joining Melbourne Law School, she taught at Sciences Po, Hitotsubashi University, and the Australian National University.