Melissa Crouch

Biography

Melissa Crouch is Professor in the School of Global & Public Law, the Faculty of Law & Justice, UNSW Sydney. Melissa’s expertise in Asian Law draws upon her empirical research across the fields of law and society, constitutionalism in the Global South, and Asian Studies, with a focus on Indonesia and Myanmar. Her most recent monograph is The Palimpsest Constitution: The Social Life of Constitutional Legacies in Myanmar (OUP 2025); edited volumes such as Constitutional Democracy in Indonesia (OUP 2022) and Women and the Judiciary in the Asia Pacific (CUP 2021); and an article on ‘The Military Turn in Comparative Constitutional Law’ (Annual Review of Law & Social Sciences). Melissa’s socio-legal work has been recognised with several awards, including the Podgórecki Prize 2022 for outstanding scholarship of an early career socio‐legal scholar by the Research Committee on the Sociology of Law, International Sociological Association.

Melissa currently holds an ARC Future Fellowship (2025-28), and she was previously the Chief Investigator on an ARC Discovery Project on constitutions in authoritarian regimes (2018-22). Melissa has been awarded visiting fellowships at several universities in Indonesia, and more recently has been a visiting fellow at the Centre for Southeast Asian Studies (Kyoto) and The Baldy Centre for Law & Social Policy (University at Buffalo, USA). For her supervision of and support for PhD students, particularly scholars from Indonesia, Melissa has been awarded the Law Faculty Postgraduate Supervisor Award at UNSW (2021). Melissa is the President of the Asian Studies Association of Australia (2023-24), an interdisciplinary association that promotes the study of Asian languages, cultures and societies. Since 2014, she has led the Asia Law & Policy Forum at UNSW.