Professor Sundhya Pahuja

Melbourne Laureate Professor
ARC Kathleen Fitzpatrick Laureate Fellow
Director - Laureate Research Program in Global Corporations and International Law

Phone number +61 3 8344 7102 Email lp-gcil@unimelb.edu.au Find an Expert Find an Expert

LocationRoom 0813

Overview

Languages spoken: English, French, Hindi, Italian

Sundhya Pahuja is the Director of the Laureate Research Program in Global Corporations and International Law and the Director of Studies for the master’s programs in International Law, and Law and Development.  She is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Social Sciences. From 2016 – 2023, she was the Director of Melbourne Law School's Institute for International Law and the Humanities (IILAH).  Sundhya is a global faculty member of the Harvard Institute for Global Law and Policy, and has served as Director of Studies in Public International Law at the Hague Academy of International Law.

Sundhya’s research focuses on the history, theory and practice of international law in historical context. She has a particular interest in international law and the relationship between global North and South countries. Sundhya teaches and supervises in the areas of international law, legal theory, political economy, international law and development, human rights, development and migration, international law, visual culture and theories of globalisation, environmental rights, transitional justice trade and investment and international migration law. She speaks and writes regularly on questions of research supervision, mentoring and methods, and in 2020, was awarded the University of Melbourne’s Award for Outstanding Graduate Researcher Supervision.

Sundhya’s current research focuses on Global Corporations and International Law, funded by an Australian Research Council Laureate Fellowship.

Her current projects also include a book with Gerry Simpson (LSE) and Matthew Craven (SOAS) on International Law and the Cold War (funded by the ARC), and an interdisciplinary research project on The Populist Challenge to International Law, in collaboration with Richard Joyce,  Andrew Benjamin (Monash), Kojo Koram (Birkbeck) and James Martel (San Francisco State University) (also funded by the ARC).  Along with Ruth Buchanan, Luis Eslava and Caitlin Murphy, and over 40 scholars, established and emerging, from the Global South and North, she has recently edited The Oxford Handbook of International Law and Development.

Sundhya has been awarded a Leverhulme Visiting Chair to Cambridge (2022), the Max Planck-Cambridge Prize for International Law (2021), a Fellowship to the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Studies (2019, 2016), a Fulbright Senior Fellow Award to Harvard (2016), the major book prize of the American Society of International Law for Decolonising International Law: Development, Economic Growth and the Politics of Universality (2012) the Woodward Medal for Excellence in the Humanities and Social Sciences in 2014.

Sundhya is a senior advisor to the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food and has held the Genest Chair at Osgoode Hall in Toronto (2018) and visiting chairs at the National University of Singapore (2019) and the Graduate Institute in Geneva (2022).

Sundhya concurrently held a Research Chair in Law at SOAS, University of London, from 2012-2015 and has held visiting appointments at Birkbeck, the LSE, NYU and UBC.   She has delivered a number of named lectures, including the Hersch Lauterpacht Memorial Lectures at Cambridge (2018), the Newman Lecture at Yale (2019), the Douglas McK Brown lecture at UBC (2020), the Jerome Chan lecture at Hong Kong University (2024), will give the Lord MacDermott Lecture at Belfast in 2025, recently gave a public lecture at Peking University, and has given keynote lectures at the annual meetings of the respective continental Societies of International Law, including ANZ, Africa and Europe.

For several years, Sundhya chaired the Committee of Management at the Darebin Community Legal Centre in Melbourne. Before entering academia, Sundhya practised as a commercial lawyer and worked as a research associate in international law and human rights at the European University Institute (EUI) in Florence.

Teaching (2025)

Research Centres