Elizabeth Rhoads

I am currently a Researcher and a Visiting Senior Lecturer at the Centre. I received my PhD in Law from King's College London, where I was a Dickson Poon Fellow, my M.A. in Human Rights Law from SOAS, and my A.B. in Anthropology from Bryn Mawr College. Following completion of my PhD, I received a Blakemore-Freeman Fellowship for studying advanced Burmese language in Yangon, Myanmar and funding from the British Academy as a Co-Investigator and Post-Doctoral Fellow on a grant with University College London's The Bartlett Development Planning Unit.

My current research project is funded by the Swedish Research Council and is a collaborative project with a Burmese organization working on histories of citizenship and displacement in and from Myanmar. The project, and my research in general, is interdisciplinary, combining legal history, legal anthropology, legal geography, urban studies, and human rights studies in understanding the everyday lived experience of citizenship, property relations, and minority-state relations in Southeast Asia. 

Prior to beginning my PhD, I spent four years living in Southeast Asia, in both Myanmar and Indonesia as a student, researcher, and an experiential education specialist. My work in Indonesia as a Fulbright Scholar focused on land and inheritance disputes related to the 1965 anti-communist massacres in Bali, but I've also worked on the linkages between memories of political participation pre-1965 and contemporary women's political participation, exclusive constructions of Balinese identity, women and violent extremism, and transitional justice.