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Usha Natarajan (PhD, MA, LLB, BA) is Honorary Fellow at the University of the West Indies (Mona), Law and Political Economy Faculty Fellow at Yale Law School, and Senior Fellow at Melbourne Law School. From 2020 to 2023, she was Edward W Said Fellow at Columbia University. She has held fellowships at McGill University, York University, the University of British Columbia, and Dalhousie University. From 2010 to 2020, Natarajan was tenured as Associate Professor of International Law and Associate Director of the Center for Migration and Refugee Studies at the American University in Cairo. Natarajan received her PhD in international law from the Australian National University. Prior to academia, she worked with international organizations in Asia and the Pacific including the United Nations, UNDP, UNESCO, and the World Bank.
Natarajan’s research is interdisciplinary, utilizing postcolonial and Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL) to provide an interrelated understanding of development, environment, migration and conflict. Her research has been recognized by global awards and grants in international environmental law, migration and refugee law, and postcolonialism, from the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, the European Instrument for Democracy and Human Rights, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the London School of Economics and Political Science, and Harvard Law School. With over 50 publications (see Academia), she is a founding editor of the TWAIL Review and serves on the editorial board of the Journal of Human Rights and the Environment and the Journal of Environmental Law and Practice.