Biography
Gee Semmalar works on legal histories, queer epistemologies, archival studies, critical colonial studies, and critical caste studies. He was awarded a doctorate in Law by the University of Kent, UK in 2023. He was the recipient of the Vice Chancellor’s Research Scholarship (2019-2022) at the University of Kent, The Modern Law Review’s Simon Roberts Award (2022) and the Socio-Legal Studies Association fieldwork grant (2019).
During his Max Weber Postdoctoral Fellowship at the History department at the EUI, Gee is working with Prof Benno Gammerl and Prof Pieter Judson on his monograph. Based on his doctoral dissertation, it is an interdisciplinary legal history on the legal and administrative production and regulation of gender deviance as caste categories in nineteenth-century British India. He has produced several academic and journalistic publications on caste, gender and resistance in South Asia, many of which have been included in undergraduate syllabi in universities in India and the US. He has taught undergraduate Law students at the University of Kent in several modules including, ‘A Critical Introduction to Law’ and ‘Criminal Law’. In India, he has delivered guest lectures on transgender legal history, critical colonial studies, contemporary trans rights and queer epistemologies of the Global South across many universities. He has experience in creative writing, films, theatre and performance.