British Academy Global Professorship award

Congratulations to Professor Saliha Belmessous (University of New South Wales) who is one of eight leading academics to be awarded a British Academy Global Professorship. Professor Belmessous will relocate to Oxford for the duration of her award.

The British Academy’s latest cohort of Global Professors will lead research examining topics ranging from the environmental impact of African economic development to changing craft practices throughout the history of Islamic Art.

Supported by the UK Government’s Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy, Global Professorships provide mid-career to senior scholars, active within any discipline from the humanities and social sciences and based in any country overseas, with the opportunity to relocate to the UK for four years to pursue individual research goals while contributing to UK research and higher education.

About Professor Belmessous' Project

This project seeks to reassess the way we think about international law. Over the past two decades, legal scholars have investigated how international law and order have come to be dominated by Western powers. They have argued that while the theorists of international law claimed to create a universal legal system applicable to global society, in reality, they shaped international law by building on their own legal traditions and in a way that best served their interests. In this project, I will test that scholarly consensus against the backdrop of the legal negotiations that Europeans and non-Europeans conducted in the Americas, Africa, and the Pacific from the 16th to the 19th century. I am interested in investigating whether the legal world in which European and non-European societies interacted was far more flexible and inclusive than what past jurists, and scholars studying them, have asserted.