Ashwini Vassanthakumar
Associate Professor, Queen's National Scholar in Legal and Political Philosophy
Faculty of Law
Queen's University
Ashwini Vasanthakumar is an Associate Professor and Queen’s National Scholar in Legal and Political Philosophy at Queen’s Law School. She holds an A.B from Harvard; an M.A from the University of Toronto; a J.D from Yale Law School; and a DPhil from Oxford, where she studied as a Canadian Rhodes Scholar.
Prior to Queen’s, she held positions at King’s College London, University of York, University of Oxford, and Jindal Global Law School. She is a researcher at the Institute for Futures Studies (Stockholm) and will be a Visiting Fellow at the Centre for Fundamental Rights at the Hertie School (Berlin).
Vasanthakumar’s research explores political authority, membership, and obligation. Her monograph, The Ethics of Exile: a political theory of diaspora, will be published by Oxford University Press in late 2021. Current research projects include: privatization and legitimacy in border control, victims’ duties to resist their oppression, and transitional justice as transnational justice.
Her research has been supported by a SSHRC Insight Development Grant, a British Academy Rising Star Award, the Swedish Research Council and the Wallenberg Foundation.