Juliet Rogers

Juliet Rogers is Professor in Criminology in the School of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Melbourne, where she serves as Director of the Law and Justice Minor. She earned her PhD in Law from the University of Melbourne at the Melbourne Law School, where she previously held a teaching position. Before entering academia, Rogers worked as a trauma counsellor, manager, and youth worker in the community sector, developing expertise in empirical research with marginalized communities. She has pursued additional studies in psychoanalysis, education, and groupwork, which inform her interdisciplinary approach to research.

Rogers' research centers on trauma studies, utilizing political, legal, and postcolonial theory alongside psychoanalysis to interrogate human responses to war, violence, and law. Her work examines female genital mutilation laws in Australia, the quality of remorse in post-conflict contexts such as Northern Ireland, South Africa, and Australia, and the cultural and legal dimensions of body modification practices. As an Australian Research Council Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (DECRA) Fellow (DE120102304), she led a project on the 'Quality of Remorse' across these regions. Rogers has been a Visiting Fellow at the University of Bologna Centre for the Study of Trauma in Italy, the European University Institute in Italy, Yale Law School in the US, University of Cape Town Law School in South Africa, and Queens University Law School in Belfast. She is a member of the editorial board of Law, Text, Culture and has contributed to ARC Discovery Projects, including DP200100902 on related themes.

Key publications include her books Transcultural Bodies: Female Genital Cutting in Global Context (Rutgers University Press, 2007) and Law's Cut on the Body of Human Rights: Female Circumcision, Torture and Sacred Flesh (Routledge, 2014). Other significant works are 'The First Case Addressing Female Genital Mutilation in Australia: Where is the Harm?' (Alternative Law Journal, 2016), 'Perversion and Perpetration in Female Genital Mutilation Law: The Unmaking of Women as Bearers of Law' (Social & Legal Studies, 2020), and 'The Politics of “Whataboutery”: The Problem of Trauma Trumping the Political in Conflictual Societies' (The British Journal of Politics and International Relations, 2017). Through her scholarship, Rogers has advanced critical understandings of law's role in addressing trauma and cultural practices within criminology.

Professional Email: juliet.rogers@unimelb.edu.au