Biography

Gee Semmalar is an activist, artist and scholar working on legal histories, queer epistemologies, archival studies, critical colonial studies and critical caste studies. He was awarded a doctorate in Law by the University of Kent, U.K. in October 2023. He secured The Vice Chancellor’s Research Scholarship (2019-2022) at the University of Kent for his PhD.

During the MWP Fellowship at the EUI history department, he will be working with Prof Benno Gammerl and Prof Pieter Judson on his first monograph. Based on his doctoral dissertation, it is an interdisciplinary legal history work on the legal and administrative production and regulation of gender deviance as caste categories in nineteenth-century British India. He has several academic and journalistic publications on caste, gender and resistance in South Asia, many of which have been included in undergraduate syllabi in universities in India and the US. He has taught undergraduate Law students at the University of Kent in several modules including, ‘A Critical Introduction to Law’ and ‘Criminal Law’. In 2022, he was awarded The Modern Law Review’s Simon Roberts Award for research granted to the 'best applicant in the field of legal anthropology, legal ethnography and socio-legal studies’. He has experience in creative writing, films, theatre and performance.

Mentor

• Benno Bastian Gammerl

Mentor

• Pieter M. Judson