Dr Amanda Whiting joined the Faculty of Law at The University of Melbourne as a Lecturer in 2004. She is currently researching and writing a history of the legal profession in Malaysia, focussing on its role as an agent of civil society. This research is funded by an Australian Research Council Post-doctoral Research Fellowship (2009-2012). She been a member of the Asian Law Centre since 1999, when she also joined the Australian Journal of Asian Law as an Editorial Assistant (1999-2002) and Editor (from 2002). She has taught in the LLB courses Law and Society in Malaysia, Land, Race and Law in Southeast Asia, Law and Society in Southeast Asia, Law and Civil Society in Asia, History and Philosophy of Law, Property and Principles of Public Law; and in the Graduate subjects Islamic Law and Politics in Asia and Citizens, Groups and States in Asia. Her research is in the area of human rights institutions and practices in the Asia-Pacific Region, gender and religion, and Malaysian legal history. She is Associate Director (Malaysia) of the Asian Law Centre. Amanda completed her honours degree in Arts at the University of Melbourne in 1981 and then taught seventeenth and eighteenth century history at the University's History Department over the next decade. She also has a Diploma of Education (1988) and a Graduate Diploma of Indonesian (1995) which was partly undertaken at Universitas Kristen Satya Wacana, Indonesia. She completed her LL.B. with First Class Honours in 2001. In 2007 she completed her doctorate - a feminist analysis of mid-seventeenth century English legal and political history. In 2004 her article "'Some Women can Shift it Well Enough': A Legal Context for Understanding the Women Petitioners of the Seventeenth-Century English Revolution" appeared in 21 Australian Feminist Law Journal 77. Amanda is the author of several articles and book chapters about human rights in Malaysia, the colliding and conflicting understandings of secular and religious law in Malaysia (particularly as they affect women and children), and the Malaysian legal profession. With Dr Carolyn Evans of this Faculty she is the editor of Mixed Blessings: Laws, Religions and Women's Rights in the Asia Pacific Region (Leiden: Martinus Nijhoff, 2006), a book about women's experiences of the dual regimes of law and religion in the Asia-Pacific region. At present she is involved in two other book projects: one (the Professor Andrew Kenyon of this Faculty), concerns media, law and politics in Singapore and Malaysia; and the other (with Professor Andrew Harding of Victoria University, British Columbia) is about current issues in law and society in Malaysia.
|
History of the Malaysian legal profession
National Human Rights Institutions in the Asia-Pacific Region
The regulation of gender and religous identity by law
Current human rights issues in Malaysia
Defamation law and political discussion in Southeast Asia
|
