Christoph Sperfeldt

Overview

Christoph Sperfeldt is Associate Professor at Macquarie Law School, Honorary Fellow at the Peter McMullin Centre on Statelessness and Associate of the Asian Law Centre at Melbourne Law School. He is also Fellow at the Center for Human Rights and International Justice at Stanford University.

From 2018 to 2021, Christoph was Senior Research Fellow at the Peter McMullin Centre on Statelessness, where he led the Centre’s Asia-Pacific engagement and was Academic Convenor of the Statelessness Hallmark Research Initiative. His interest in statelessness arose from multi-year field research among the Vietnamese minority in Cambodia. He has advised the UNHCR and was member of a UN International Expert Group on a study on undocumented populations in Sabah, Malaysia. He is also a member of the editorial committee of the Statelessness & Citizenship Review, an Advisory Group member for the Regional Coalition on Statelessness Asia, and a Board member for Nationality for All.

Christoph is co-editor of Statelessness in Asia (CUP 2025, together with Michelle Foster and Jaclyn Neo), an interdisciplinary collection that provides the first book-length treatment of statelessness in the region in which most stateless persons reside.

Christoph has extended this work into research on legal identity more broadly. His ARC DECRA research project (2024-2027) seeks to contribute to the study of exclusion and inequality associated with the pursuit of modern legal and digital identification solutions. By building research and engagement partnerships at country and international levels, especially in Southeast Asia, this project contributes to improving our understanding of how exclusion or inequality in identification frameworks and practices is produced and who it affects. The goal is to identify and consider more inclusive and equitable state and non-state approaches to legal and digital identity that provide improved protections and development opportunities for marginalised populations in different contexts.

Prior to joining academia, Christoph was Deputy Director at the Asian International Justice Initiative, a joint program of the East-West Center and Stanford University, and Senior Advisor with the Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) in Cambodia.