Researchers

Melia Belli Bose is Associate Professor of Asian Art History at the University of Victoria. She earned her Ph.D. from the University of California, Los Angeles and MA from the University of London. Dr. Belli Bose’s research focuses on South Asian visual cultures from the early modern to contemporary periods. She is the author of Royal Umbrellas of Stone: Memory, Politics, and Public Identity in Rajput Funerary Art (2015), editor of Women, Gender and Art in Asia, c. 1500-1900 (2016), as well as author of several articles and book chapters on topics including: gender, memorialization, and public art in India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh.

Dr. Susan Breau is a research Professor at the Faculty of Law, University of Victoria. Previously she was Dean of the Faculty of Law, University of Victoria and was the Head of the School of Law at the University of Reading, UK. She has a distinguished record of achievement as a researcher, teacher and administrator. She specializes in international law particularly in the law of armed conflict, international humanitarian law, international human rights law and international disaster law. She is currently working on a second edition of her Research Handbook in Disasters and International Law (Edward Elgar).

She completed her Bachelor of Arts, Bachelor of Laws and Masters of Arts degrees at Queen’s University. She practiced law in Kingston, Ontario, for almost 20 years before completing Master of Laws and Doctor of Philosophy degrees at the London School of Economics and Political Science. She has taught and lectured at law schools throughout the United Kingdom and Australia. Dr. Breau was the Dorset Fellow in Public International Law at the British Institute of International and Comparative Law.

Marlea specialises in comparative politics and the Global South (particularly Africa). Her broad research interests are globalisation, employment and labour market restructuring from a comparative and feminist political economy perspective, regional (African) clothing production networks, and south-south labour migration and investment (specifically Asia-Africa). Her current, SSHRC-funded, five-year research project focuses on changing patterns of trade and global production of clothing, especially regional production networks and labour standards in sub-Saharan Africa. This research includes an exploration of the role of Asian migrant workers in clothing production in Lesotho and Mauritius, and Asian investment in African clothing and textiles industries.

Phil Dearden was appointed Professor of Geography in 1981 and was Chair of the Department between 2008 and 2013. His main research interests are in conservation, particularly related to protected area systems, and he is the co-author of Parks and Protected Areas in Canada: Planning and Management, published by Oxford University Press and commonly used as a textbook on the topic in Canada.

Most of Dr. Dearden's career has been spent in the tropics and particularly in Southeast Asia. He has had active research programs in Thailand for 30 years and worked throughout other countries in the region, particularly Cambodia and the Philippines. He also has extensive experience in Sri Lanka and for the last 10 years has been involved in research programs related to poverty and protected areas in Ghana and Tanzania.

He is particularly interested in incentive-based conservation and working with communities to generate benefits from conservation activities. He is a member of the Community Conservation Research Network, based at St Mary’s University and a collaborator of the Centre for Indigenous Conservation and Development Alternatives based at McGill University.

Most of his activity is now focused on the marine environment, both in Canada and overseas. He leads the Marine Protected Areas Research Group (MPARG) at UVic and has research interests ranging from marine mammals through to coral reef monitoring, community-based governance, shark watching and SCUBA diver management in South East Asia.

Professor Dearden is actively involved with efforts to improve marine conservation in Myanmar. Working with both IUCN and Fauna and Flora International (FFI) Dearden has taken part in field expeditions and led several workshops and training courses on marine conservation. He has also provided a blueprint to the Myanmar Government on strategies and actions necessary to establish a MPA system in Myanmar with special attention on the Myeik Archipelago.

He was the Leader of the MPA Working Group for Canada’s Ocean Management Research Network, Co-Chair of Parks Canada's NMCA Marine Science Advisory Network and Expert Advisor to the Auditor General for the 2012 audit of MPA progress. He is a member of IUCN's World Commission on Protected Areas and has acted as consultant to the Asian Development Bank, the World Bank, IUCN, UNESCO, UNDP, CIDA, as well as many government agencies in Asia and Canada. He is a member of the College of reviewers for the Canada Research Chair Program, a past member of the SSHRC national adjudication panel on grant allocations and a Fellow of the Royal Canadian Geographical Society. A firm believer in the utility of NGOs he is a Trustee Emeritus of the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society and currently on the Board of the Living Oceans Society. In 2011he was the Chair of the Local Organising Committee of the International Marine Conservation Congress (IMCC), the world’s largest marine conservation meeting. He is a member of an international working group funded by the National Science Foundation to develop an integrated framework to model resilience of the coupled human/natural environment in tropical and subtropical coastal systems. 

Jingjai Hanchanlash received his Ph. D. in Public Law from France. His Post–Doctorate training included “Project Analysis” at the University of Connecticutt, USA and “Mid Career Management” at the University of Western Ontario, Canada. He has a wide range of experience in working in the public sector, international organizations, NGOs, academic and private sectors.

He started his career working with the Thai Government for 9 years coordinating technical and economic cooperation programs between Thailand and major European Countries. He then joined the International Development Research Center, where he served for 23 years, mainly as Asia Regional Director overseeing development research grants. He has been in the private sector since 1997.

Jingjai Hanchanlash's positions include: Chairman, Rutnin-Gimbel Lasic Center; Chairman Loxpac Co.; Chairman GMS Business Forum; Executive Board Member, The Thai Chamber of Commerce; Chairman, The French-Thai Business Council. He is also currently serving as Board member in several public organizations such as the National Education Council, the National Science and Technology Development Agency, and the Health Promotion Fund. His academic responsibilities include: Chairman of the Executive Board, University of Thai Chamber of Commerce and Council Member of King Prajadhipok Institute. He actively interacts with the civil society through his position as Secretary General of the Development Cooperation Foundation.

Asad G. Kiyani joined the University of Calgary Faculty of Law in 2019 after two years at UVic. He holds an LL.B from Osgoode Hall, an LL.M from Cambridge, and a PhD from UBC, where he was awarded a Four-Year Fellowship, a SSHRC Vanier CGS Scholarship, the Charles Bourne Graduate Scholarship in International Law, and the Dean of Law PhD Prize. Prior to joining UVic, Asad was an Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Law and an Adjunct Professor at the Centre for Transitional Justice and Post-Conflict Reconstruction at Western University.

Asad researches and teaches in domestic and international criminal law, immigration and refugee law (including national security issues), evidence, postcolonial theory, legal pluralism, and comparative law. His current research projects focus on three areas. The first critically examines the major obstacles to legal pluralism as a practical method in international criminal law, and the role of international bodies and Third World governments in co-opting pluralist practices. The second considers the utility and risks of extending Gladue-based sentencing principles to non-Indigenous communities, and the extent to which those principles turn on the specific colonial experience of Indigenous peoples in Canada. The third examines the racialized effects of contemporary Canadian national security policy, and the commingling of administrative and criminal law.

Asad has written a number of book chapters and articles, including for the Supreme Court Law Review, the American Journal of Comparative Law, the Journal of International Criminal Justice, the NYU Journal of Law & Politics, and the American Journal of International Law: Unbound. He is a recipient of the 2017 Antonio Cassese Prize for International Criminal Law Studies for his article “Group-Based Differentiation and Local Repression: The Custom and Curse of Selectivity”, and his article “Al-Bashir & the ICC: The Problem of Head of State Immunity” was cited by the Supreme Court of Appeal of South Africa in its decision on the South African government’s obligation to arrest suspects indicted by the International Criminal Court.

Before beginning his doctoral studies, Asad articled with the Department of Justice in Toronto, worked as a Pegasus Scholar with barristers at Garden Court Chambers and 2 Bedford Row in the United Kingdom, and was part of the appeal team for Issa Hassan Sesay before the Special Court for Sierra Leone. He also worked with various Toronto-area legal aid clinics, including Parkdale Community Legal Services and the South Asian Legal Clinic of Ontario, and was posted to Ethiopia as part of a capacity-building partnership between the Canadian Bar Association and the Ethiopian Bar Association.

Asad was called to the bar by the Law Society of Upper Canada in 2006, and is currently a member of the National Council for Canadian Muslims Advisory Panel on National Security. 

Jae Woon (June) Lee is Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Law in the Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK). Born in Seoul and educated there as well as at McGill University (LLM) and National University of Singapore (PhD), June’s main re­search and teaching interests are aviation law and competition law. He has seven years of legal affairs experience in the airline industry prior to joining the academia and is the sole editor of the book Aviation Law and Policy in Asia: Smart Regulation in Liberalized Markets (BRILL, 2020).

Dr. ann-elise lewallen engages with Indigenous and frontline communities in Japan, India, and across Asia, who seek to strengthen their relationship with place through critical mapping, heritage practice, and environmental justice. Lewallen’s academic work focuses on critical Indigenous studies, settler colonialism, gender and embodiment, energy justice, and critical geographies in contemporary Japan, India, and the Asia-Pacific. Her work advocates for Indigenizing knowledge by centering practices such as Traditional Ecological Knowledge and community mapping as sites of knowledge production, toward more sustainable models of planetary health. To this end, she works to empower Indigenous and marginalized communities through co-learning new skillsets such as mapping and ethnographic practice, toward decolonizing research and transforming academic practice.

Qian Liu completed her Ph.D. in Law and Society at the Faculty of Law, University of Victoria in 2020 and is now an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Calgary. Her research interests include legal consciousness in Chinese societies, legal pluralism, feminist legal theory, postcolonial feminist theory, sexual orientation and the law, qualitative research, and gender issues in China. Dr. Liu is the author of several articles including “Legal Consciousness of the Leftover Woman: Law and Qingin Chinese Family Relations,” which won the 2019 Asian Law and Society Association Graduate Student Article Award. She is currently working on a monograph on the impact of the interaction of state law, family relations, and social expectations on Chinese leftover women’s choices in marriage and childbearing.

Dr. Andrew Marton specializes in contemporary Chinese studies. His research revolves around spatial economic transformation in China’s mega-urban regions, with a particular focus on the lower Yangzi delta. Dr. Marton is founding member of the Diffuse Cities & Urbanization Network with a comparative focus on Asian and European urban regions. Other research interests in China include studies of administrative restructuring, hybrid spaces of production and consumption in the countryside, education, and the emergence of new spaces for the visual arts and other creative activities. Dr. Marton is also undertaking research examining the doctrine of the unequal treaties and China’s approach to international law.

Dr. Marton served as CAPI Director from 2014 to 2017.

Catherine Morris has been involved in the field of conflict resolution since 1983. She has played key roles in numerous Canadian and international conflict resolution organizations and initiatives in academic, community, nonprofit, public and private sectors. She is a founding director of Peacemakers Trust, a Canadian charitable organization for education and research in conflict transformation and peacebuilding. She is a member of the bar in British Columbia.

Catherine is an Associate and a former Executive Director of the Institute for Dispute Resolution at the University of Victoria, where she worked in several leadership roles from 1992-1998. She is also an Associate of the Centre for Asia-Pacific Initiatives (CAPI) at the University of Victoria. She has taught internationally in non-formal and formal settings, including graduate-level courses at the University of Victoria, Osgoode Hall Law School, Chulalongkorn University and the Royal University of Phnom Penh. Her papers and publications include works on mediator ethics and qualifications, conflict and culture, ADR in legal education, religion and conflict, and peacebuilding in Cambodia. Her LLM thesis is entitled "Peacebuilding in Cambodia: Transforming Public Dialogue about Human Rights."

Midori Ogasawara is Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Victoria. She earned her Ph.D. in Sociology at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, in 2018. Her research focuses on social consequences of surveillance and technologies, such as facial recognition system and smart phone. Her doctoral dissertation explores Japan’s colonial biometric identification systems developed in Northeast China under the Japanese occupation in 1931-1945. A summary of this research was published in Making Surveillance States: Transnational Histories (2019, University of Toronto Press).

Before joining the University of Victoria, Dr. Ogasawara was a Banting Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Ottawa. Obtaining the first degree in law at Waseda University in Japan, she was an investigative journalist for Japan’s national newspaper The Asahi Shimbun for about 10 years. By leading a media campaign on Japan’s first digitized national identification system, Midori was awarded the Fulbright Journalist Scholarship and John S. Knight Professional Journalism Fellowships at Stanford University. In 2016, she became the first Japanese journalist/researcher who interviewed the U.S. National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden via a video channel, and published two books (2016, 2019) that unveil the NSA’s secret spying activities in Japan. She is also an author of three other books, several book chapters and peer-reviewed journal articles (Surveillance & Society, The Journal of Contemporary Eastern Asia).

Thanh Phan currently teaches Engineering Law at UVic. He previously worked for the Vietnamese government for ten years as a delegate negotiating free trade agreements and an expert in competition law enforcement. He was educated at Hanoi Law University, Nagoya University, and received his PhD in Law from UVic. He has published journal articles in the Houston Journal of International Law, Louisiana Law Review, American Bar Association’s International Antitrust Bulletin, and Journal of Fair Trade of Japan. He is interested in transnational law, law and technology, and corporate governance.

Supriya Routh is an Assistant Professor of Law at the Faculty of Law, University of Victoria, where he teaches Contracts, Individual Employment Relationship Law, and the Legal Process. He is also a member of the Curriculum Committee and the Graduate Studies Committee at the Faculty. Supriya’s research interests include theoretical conceptualizations of work and labour law, workers’ organization initiatives, international labour law, atypical and informal workers in the global South, and human rights and human development. His current research project explores the role and limitations of substantive human rights guarantees in promoting informal and precarious workers’ aspirations, and the innovative form and strategies of the newer kinds of workers’ organizations that are emerging in the Global South.

Prior to joining the University of Victoria, Supriya held research positions (Post-doctoral and Chair Research positions) at the University of Laval, Nantes Institute for Advanced Study, and Humboldt University. A Fulbright Scholar, Supriya holds a PhD in Law & Society from the University of Victoria, LLMs from the Vanderbilt University Law School and the West Bengal National University of Juridical Sciences, and BA, LLB from the University of North Bengal. Before commencing his doctoral studies, Supriya has had three years of teaching experience, teaching both LLB and LLM curriculums at the West Bengal National University of Juridical Sciences, where he held an Assistant Professor position. 

Supriya is the author of Enhancing Capabilities through Labour Law: Informal Workers in India (Routledge, 2014) and academic journal articles in the areas of labour law, informal workers, trade unionism, law and development, corporate social responsibility, right to information, and legal education. He is the co-editor (along with Vando Borghi) of Workers and the Global Informal Economy: Interdisciplinary Perspective, published by Routledge in 2016.

Mr. Stephens has more than 35 years of government and business experience in the Asia-Pacific region. Based in Victoria, BC, Canada, he is currently Vice Chair of the Canadian Committee on Pacific Economic Cooperation (CANCPEC), Senior Fellow at the Asia Pacific Foundation of Canada, Executive Fellow at the School of Public Policy at the University of Calgary, and an associate faculty member in the School of Business at Royal Roads University, Victoria, BC. Before returning to Canada in December 2009, he was Senior Vice President (Public Policy) for Asia-Pacific for Time Warner for almost a decade, located at the company’s regional headquarters in Hong Kong. In this capacity he managed Time Warner’s public policy program in Asia Pacific for Turner Broadcasting, HBO, Warner Bros, Time Inc. and AOL.

Mr. Stephens has been an active leader in a number of regional business organizations in Asia. He served on the Executive Committee of the Board of the US National Center for APEC and is a past Executive Committee Board member of the US-Korea Business Council. He has been a member of the Board of Directors of the US-ASEAN Business Council, Governor of the American Chamber of Commerce in Hong Kong and Vice Chair of the Quality Brands Protection Committee, a coalition of more than 180 multinational companies engaged in strengthening IPR protection in China.

In recent years, he has written and commented extensively on Canada’s engagement with the Asia Pacific region and has testified before the Foreign Affairs and International Trade committee of the Canadian Senate.

Prior to joining Time Warner in 2000, Mr. Stephens spent 30 years in the Canadian Foreign Service with the Department of External Affairs, later the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade (DFAIT). His last Ottawa assignment was as Assistant Deputy Minister for Policy and Communications in DFAIT. He also served abroad as Canadian Representative in Taiwan (Head of Mission-Canadian Trade Office in Taipei), Counsellor and Charge d’affaires at the Canadian Embassies in Seoul, Korea and Islamabad, Pakistan, among a number other overseas and headquarters assignments, including service at the Canadian Embassy in Beijing and Mandarin language training in Hong Kong.

Mr. Stephens was educated at the University of British Columbia (UBC), University of Toronto and Duke University, and has a Certificate in Mandarin from the Chinese University of Hong Kong.

Jeremy Webber is Professor of Law at the University of Victoria. He has written widely in constitutional law, Indigenous rights, federalism, cultural diversity, and constitutional theory in Canada and in relation to other countries (especially Australia). He is the author of Reimagining Canada: Language, Culture, Community and the Canadian Constitution (1994), The Constitution of Canada: A Contextual Analysis (2015), and Las gramáticas de la ley: Derecho, pluralismo y justicia (2017). 

Professor Webber was UVic’s Dean of Law from 2013 to 2018. He held the Canada Research Chair in Law and Society at UVic from 2002 to 2014, when he surrendered the chair to serve as Dean of Law. Prior to joining UVic, he was Dean of Law at the University of Sydney, Australia (1998-2002) and Professor of Law at McGill University (1987-1998). He was appointed a Fellow of the Trudeau Foundation in 2009 and a Fellow of Royal Society of Canada in 2016.

Can Zhao completed his Ph.D. in political science at the Department of Political Science, University of Victoria in 2022. He has multiple years of experience in policy analysis in France, China and Canada, and currently works for the B.C. government. His research interests lie at the intersection of the international political economy of cross-border capital flow, the comparative political economy of development, and institutional evolution, with an empirical focus on greater China. He is currently turning his Ph.D. dissertation into a monograph which explains how and why Beijing has managed to parlay foreign capital into a foreign-invested, home-grown, and Chinese-controlled information industry without challenging its authoritarian rule.

Dr. Ly Anh Hoàng is a Lecturer in International Law and Acting Head of the Department of Research Management and Journal Administration at Hanoi Law University. Dr. Hoàng will be at UVic for three months working on her current research project investigating Vietnam's compliance with the UN Convention on Biological Diversity and undertaking a research placement with UVic's Environmental Law Centre.

Dr. Barter is an Associate Professor at Soka University of America, where he serves as the Director of the Pacific Basin Research Center.  His research focuses on armed conflict, elections, and territorial autonomy especially in Southeast Asian countries.  While at CAPI, his primary project is writing a new book, Armed Conflicts in Southeast Asia: Ethnicity and Difference, part of the Southeast Asian politics Elements series with Cambridge University Press.

Sunayana Ganguly is currently Assistant Professor at the Azim Premji University in Bangalore. She received her PhD in Political Science from the Freie Universität Berlin where she was affiliated with the Environmental Policy Research Centre, while working with the German Development Institute in Bonn. She was also previously, a research associate at the Industrial Ecology Group, University of Lausanne (Switzerland), working on the interdisciplinary research project on the dynamics of consumption patterns, practices and policies among new consumers in two megacities of South and South-East Asia. Her first book Deliberating Environment Policy in India - Participation and the role of advocacy was published in 2015 (Routledge). Her time at CAPI will be spent exploring themes on environmental governance, civil society and sustainable consumption with a focus on South Asia.

Dr. Ghosh was awarded the Fulbright-Nehru Doctoral and Professional Research Fellowship for the year 2010-2011. She was also awarded a doctoral fellowship at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, Harvard University, Boston, as a Berkman Fellow. She was also an awardee of the SUN Scholarship by the Central European University and was invited to attend the program on Teaching Human Rights and Legal Ethics, Budapest (2009). She qualified for the UGC-NET for Lectureship in 2006 and was awarded the UGC-Junior Research Fellowship.

Her teaching areas and specializations include Administrative Law, Legal Ethics, Law of Good Governance and Digital Copyright Law. She has published text books on Administrative Law (Textbook on Administrative Law, LexisNexis, 2016) and on Legal Ethics (Legal Ethics and the Profession of Law, LexisNexis, 2014). She has also published several articles. She is presently working on a Government of India sponsored research project on the Right to Timely Delivery of Service Laws in India and Litigation Policy in India.