Dr Oishik Sircar

Overview

Dr Oishik Sircar is Senior Lecturer at Melbourne Law School, The University of Melbourne where he teaches Torts and Legal Theory in the JD programme and International Human Rights Law in the Law Masters. Prior to joining MLS, Oishik was Professor and founding faculty at Jindal Global Law School, OP Jindal Global University from 2009-2024 where he taught Jurisprudence, Torts and Criminal Law. Oishik has held visiting positions at the National Law School of India University, the Women’s Studies Centre, University of Pune, West Bengal National University of Juridical Sciences, and University of Calcutta.

Oishik is a theorist of the relationship between modern law and violence, and his research joins with traditions of legal scholarship in the fields of postcolonial studies, queer theory, cultural studies and left and feminist social movements.

Oishik is the author of Ways of Remembering: Law, Cinema and Collective Memory in the New India (Cambridge University Press, 2024) and Violent Modernities: Cultural Lives of Law in the New India (Oxford University Press, 2021). He is the co-editor of two landmark volumes on queer politics and the law from Zubaan: New Intimacies, Old Desires: Law, Culture and Queer Politics in Neoliberal Times (2017) and Desire and its Discontents: Queer Politics in Contemporary India (2024).

Oishik is the co-director of the award-winning documentary film We Are Foot Soldiers (PSBT, 2011) and his Osgoode Hall Law Journal article “Spectacles of Emancipation: Rethinking Rights in India’s Legal Discourse” won the 2014 UK Socio-Legal Studies Association Article Prize. In 2020, the Foundation for Universal Responsibility of His Holiness the Dalai Lama awarded Oishik the WISCOMP-Saahas Award for innovations in feminist legal pedagogy.

Oishik is on the editorial board of the Australian Journal of Asian Law and on the advisory board of the Indian Law Review. Oishik was previously editor of the Jindal Global Law Review (2019-2023).

Oishik completed his LLB from ILS Law College, University of Pune, LLM from the Faculty of Law, University of Toronto and PhD from Melbourne Law School.

Oishik invites expressions of interest from prospective doctoral students in the areas of postcolonial legal institutions and cultures, critical approaches to law, mass violence and state impunity, and cultural legal studies.

Other Faculty and University Responsibilities

Editorial Board, Australian Journal of Asian Law

Memberships and Affiliations

Faculty, Academy in Advanced Legal Research and Method, Transnational Association of Legal Scholars, Laureate Research Programme in Global Corporations and International Law, Melbourne Law School

Life Member, Indian Association for Women’s Studies

Advisory Board Member, Indian Law Review