Amanda Whiting

Associate Professor Amanda Whiting serves as Associate Director (Malaysia) of the Asian Law Centre at Melbourne Law School, University of Melbourne, having been a member of the Centre since 1999 and joining the School of Law as a Lecturer in 2004. She holds an honours degree in Arts from the University of Melbourne (1981), a Diploma of Education (1988), a Graduate Diploma of Indonesian (1995, partly at Universitas Kristen Satya Wacana, Indonesia), an LL.B. with First Class Honours (2001), and a doctorate (2007) comprising a feminist analysis of mid-seventeenth-century English legal and political history. Whiting chairs the Faculty of Law Human Ethics Advisory Group and has been involved with the Australian Journal of Asian Law since its inaugural issue in 1999, serving as an editor since 2002, including co-editing a special issue on LGBTQI Rights in Asia (2019).

Her research focuses on Malaysian legal and political history, human rights institutions and practices in the Asia-Pacific region, and the intersection of gender, society, religion, and law, with particular reference to Malaysia. From 2009 to 2012, she held an Australian Research Council Postdoctoral Fellowship for the project 'Lawyers, Civil Society and the State in Post-colonial Malaysia,' supporting her current book on the history of the Malaysian legal profession's role in defending the rule of law. Key publications include Women and Petitioning in the Seventeenth-Century English Revolution: Deference, Difference and Dissent (Brepols Publishers, 2015); co-editor of Mixed Blessings: Laws, Religions and Women's Rights in the Asia-Pacific Region (Martinus Nijhoff, 2006); co-editor of Democracy, Media and Law in Malaysia and Singapore: A Space for Speech (Routledge, 2014); co-editor of Legal History Matters: From Magna Carta to the Clinton Impeachment (Melbourne University Press, 2021); and influential articles such as 'Situating Suhakam: Human Rights Debates and Malaysia's National Human Rights Commission' (2003, 70 citations), 'Custodian of Civil Liberties and Justice in Malaysia' (2012, 31 citations), and 'Secularism, the Islamic State and the Malaysian Legal Profession' (2010, 31 citations).

Professional Email: a.whiting@unimelb.edu.au