Honorary Research Fellows
Dr Nyi Nyi Kyaw
Nyi Nyi Kyaw is a fellow at the Kulturwissenschaftliches Institut Essen (KWI)/Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities in Germany. He is also an honorary fellow at Peter McMullin Centre on Statelessness at the University of Melbourne. After obtaining his PhD in international and political studies from the University of New South Wales, he was a postdoctoral research fellow and assistant professor (adjunct) at the National University of Singapore in 2016–18 and 2020, respectively. He was affiliated with the ISEAS–Yusof Ishak Institute in Singapore as a visiting fellow from June 2019 until December 2020. Nyi Nyi has published papers in peer-reviewed journals including Social Identities, Journal of Immigrant and Refugee Studies, and Review of Faith & International Affairs, and book chapters on citizenship, nationalism and constitutional change in Myanmar, among other topics. He is currently working on a manuscript on Myanmar Spring.
Dr Christoph Sperfeldt
Christoph Sperfeldt is Honorary Fellow at the Peter McMullin Centre on Statelessness and an Associate of the Asia Law Centre at Melbourne Law School. From 2018 to 2021, he 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. He is also a Fellow at the Center for Human Rights and International Justice at Stanford University, and Adjunct Professor at the Center for the Study of Humanitarian Law at the Royal University of Law and Economics, Cambodia. Christoph pursues socio-legal research in areas of human rights and justice, including statelessness and legal identity, international and regional human rights protection, and transitional and international criminal justice. He has studied these issues particularly in a context of peacebuilding and development cooperation, with a geographical focus on Southeast Asia. Christoph holds a PhD from the School of Regulation and Global Governance (RegNet) at the Australian National University. He was a University Fellow at Charles Darwin University and has held visiting positions at the Centre of Excellence for International Courts (iCourts) at the University of Copenhagen, the International Victimology Institute (INTERVICT) at Tilburg University, the Leuven Institute of Criminology (LINC) at KU Leuven, the Minerva Center for Human Rights at Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Stanford University and Queen’s University Belfast. Prior to joining academia, Christoph worked for more than a decade on human rights, the rule of law and statelessness, predominantly in Southeast Asia. He was Deputy Director at the Asian International Justice Initiative, a joint program of the East-West Center and the Center for Human Rights and International Justice at Stanford University, where he supported human rights and rule of law capacity development in ASEAN. Prior to this, Christoph was Senior Advisor with the German development agency (GIZ) in Cambodia.
Dr Adil Hasan Khan
Dr Adil Hasan Khan is currently a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Melbourne Law School, where his research seeks to examine different traditions and modalities of legal education and to describe and recover repertoires of training in living well with authority, with others, and their laws. As part of this he is currently completing two main projects. One is a monograph on rival traditions of laws of nations in South Asia, and the displacement of an Indo-Islamic-Persian tradition by a European Colonial international law through transformations in legal education in South Asia over the course of the 19th and mid-20th centuries. Second, is a short monograph that seeks to describe international legal histories written from within the dominant tradition of critique as particular forms of spiritual exercises that seeks to train selves and others into achieving conversion, and thus into forms of life that struggle to live well with others, and their laws. He completed his PhD in International Studies, with a specialisation in International Law and a minor in Anthropology and Sociology of Development, at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies (IHEID) in Geneva (2010-2016). He has been a Senior Research Fellow with the Peter McMullin Centre on Statelessness at MLS (2021-2022), a McKenzie Postdoctoral Fellow at MLS (2017-2020), a Residential Institute Fellow at the Institute for Global Law and Policy (IGLP), Harvard Law School (2016-2017), and a Junior Visiting Fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences (IWM), Vienna (2015-2016). Currently he is a Visitor at the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS), Princeton University (mid-2023).