Dianne Otto is Director of the Institute for International Law and the Humanities (IILAH) at Melbourne Law School. She is also Project Director for Peacekeeping in the Asia Pacific Centre for Military Law (APCML). She researches in the areas of public international law, human rights law and critical legal theory, with a current focus on gender and sexuality issues in the context of the UN Security Council, peacekeeping and international human rights law. Dianne’s scholarship explores how international legal discourse reinforces hierarchies of nation, race, gender and sexuality, and aims to understand how the reproduction of such legal knowledge can be resisted. Her work draws upon and develops a range of critical legal theories particularly those influenced by feminism, postcolonialism, poststructuralism and queer theory.

Her recent publications include chapters in Margaret Davies and Vanessa Munro (eds), A Research Companion to Feminist Legal Theory (Ashgate Companion Series, 2012) and Sari Kouvo and Zoe Pearson (eds), Feminist Perspectives on Contemporary International Law: Between Resistance and Compliance? (Onati/Hart, 2011). She has also edited three volumes on Gender Issues and Human Rights (Edward Elgar Publishing, Human Rights Law Series, Series Editor, Sarah Joseph, forthcoming 2012) and prepared a bibliographic chapter, ‘Feminist Approaches’, in Oxford Bibliographies Online: International Law, ed. Tony Carty (New York: Oxford University Press, forthcoming 2012).

Professor Otto has held visiting positions at Columbia University, the School of Oriental and African Studies, New York University and the University of British Columbia. In 2004 she was the Kate Stoneman Endowed Visiting Professor in Law and Democracy, at Albany Law School in New York. She will teach in the Oxford-George Washington University International Human Rights Law Summer School Programme at Oxford University in July 2012. She sits on the Advisory Boards of Third World Legal Studies, Melbourne Journal of International Law, The Third World and International Law and the Australian Yearbook of International Law. She has also been active in a number of human rights NGOs including Women’s Rights Action Network Australia (WRANA), Women’s Economic Equality Project (WEEP) Canada, International Women’s Rights Action Watch Asia Pacific (IWRAW-AP) Malaysia, and International Women’s Tribune Centre (IWTC) New York. She helped draft a General Comment on women’s equality for the Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights and a General Recommendation on treaty obligations for the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women.