Renisa Mawani is Professor and Canada Research Chair in Colonial Legal Histories. She is the author of Colonial Proximities (University of British Columbia Press, 2009) and Across Oceans of Law (Duke University Press, 2018), which was a finalist for the U.K. Socio-Legal Studies Association Theory and History Book Prize (2020) and winner of the Association of Asian American Studies Book Prize for Outstanding Contribution to History (2020).

With Antoinette Burton, she is co-editor of Animalia: An Anti-Imperial Bestiary for Our Times (Duke University Press, 2020). With Antoinette Burton and Samantha Frost, she is co-editor of Biocultural Empire: New Histories of Imperial Life Worlds (Bloomsbury, 2024) and with Kristie Flannery and Mikki Stelder, she is co-editor of Oceans as Archives (Routledge, 2025).

Renisa has just completed a short book, The Laws of the Sea, which is under contract with Cambridge (Elements Series, “Law and Humanities”. She is working on a longer monograph, Enemies of Empire, which is a sequel to Across Oceans of Law.

From 2022-2025, she was a Global Professorial Fellow at the School of Law, Queen Mary University of London.

My research is organized along two trajectories.

The first meets at the interface of critical theory and legal history. To date, my work has aimed to write histories of colonial dispossession aimed at Indigenous peoples and restrictions imposed on “Asiatic” migration (from China and India, in particular) as conjoined and entangled colonial legal processes that are central to the politics of settler colonialism, historically and in the contemporary moment. My first book, Colonial Proximities (2009), details legal encounters between Indigenous peoples, Chinese migrants, Europeans, and those enumerated as “mixed race” along Canada’s west coast. The book considers how state racisms were produced and mobilized through land, law, and labour in sites of colonial re-settlement.

My second book, Across Oceans of Law (2018), traces the currents and counter-currents of British/ colonial law and Indian radicalism through the 1914 journey of the S.S. Komagata Maru, a British-built and Japanese owned steamship. The book draws on archival research conducted in Canada, India, and the U.K. and reorients the ship’s passage away from the optics of immigration, nationalism, and landfall, towards a global and maritime legal history. By following this one ship through time and space, the book draws the Pacific, Indian, and Atlantic Oceans into a single analytic frame, and in so doing, explores the entanglements between transatlantic slavery, efforts to dispossess Indigenous peoples from their lands and waterways, Indian indentureship, and “free” migration.

My current book project, Enemies of Empire: Commerce and Confinement in Colonial India, Burma, and Siam, 1914-1920, is a sequel to Across Oceans of Law. Focused on the Ingress into India Ordinance and the Foreigners Ordinance, the book examines how colonial officials sought to redraw and control maritime and land-based borders between India, Burma, and Siam during the World War I period and beyond. In September 1914, as authorities anticipated the arrival of the Komagata Maru, Lord Hardinge, Viceroy and Governor-General of India, signed the Ingress into India Ordinance, which granted local police and magistrates unprecedented power to arrest and detain Indian men returning from abroad. The ordinance was ostensibly aimed at so-called seditionists from Punjab but was used more widely, criminalizing merchants and traders in India, Burma, and Siam. To document the coercive effects of the Ingress, including the devastating consequences for families and communities, Enemies of Empire is a legal history through family biography. The protagonists of this story include four Muslim brothers from Gujarat who were living and working along the Burma-Siam border and seeking new economic opportunities beyond the impositions of caste. Under the auspices of war-time security, the Ingress granted colonial authorities the ability to criminalize trading families, thereby expanding the imperial carceral state and creating new “enemies of empire” in the process.

My second set of interests, “legalities of nature,” coalesce at the juncture of science, law, and history. I have written a series of articles on law and nature through parks and place. A central concern has been the ways in which colonial violence has been imposed and legitimized through racial, legal, civic, and state claims to nature, identity, and wilderness.

Books

Mawani, R. Across Oceans of Law: The Komagata Maru and Jurisdiction in the Time of Empire (Durham: Duke University Press, 2018).

Mawani, R. Colonial Proximities: Cross Racial Encounters and Juridical Truths in British Columbia, 1871-1921 (Law and Society Series, UBC Press, 2009)

Edited Books/ Journal Special Issues

Flannery, K.P, R. Mawani, & M. Stelder. Oceans as Archives. Oceans and Island Series (London: Routledge, 2025).

Burton, A., R. Mawani & S. Frost. Biocultural Empire: New Histories of Imperial Life Worlds (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2024).

Burton, A., R. Mawani. Animalia: An Anti-Imperial Bestiary for our Times (Durham: Duke University Press, 2020)

Giffen, S., C. Lee, R. Mawani. “Worlds at Home: On Cosmopolitan Futures,” Journal of Intercultural Studies, 40(5), 2019.

Dhamoon, R., Bhandar, D., Mawani, R., Bains, S. (eds.), Charting Imperial Itineraries: Unmooring the Komagata Maru (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2019).

Hussin, I., Mawani, R “The Travels of Law: Indian Ocean Itineraries.” Law and History Review, 32(4), 2014.

Select Journal Articles

Mawani, R. “Legal Personhood at Sea: The British Merchant Ship,” Representations, 172(1), 2025: 52-70.

Mawani, R. “The British Indian Question in Natal,” Safundi, 25(3), 2024:94-99.

Mawani, R. “The Ship, the Slave, the Legal Person,” Studies in Law, Politics, and Society, 87, 2023: 19-42.

Mawani, R. “Navigating Colonial Law in a ‘Sea of Islands,’” Law and Social Inquiry, 47(1), 2022: 355- 361.

Mawani, R., Prange, S. “Unruly Oceans: Law, Violence, and Sovereignty at Sea,” TWAILR: Third World Approaches to International Law Review, 2021

Mawani, R. “From Slave Revolts to Social Death,” Theory and Society, 48, 2019: 835-849.

Mawani, R. “Law, Settler Colonialism, and the Forgotten Space of Maritime Worlds.” Annual Review of Law and Social Science, 12, 2016: 107-131.

Mawani, R. “The Times of Law,” Law and Social Inquiry, Winter, 40(1), 2015: 253-263.

Mawani, R & I. Hussin. “The Travels of Law: An Introduction,” Law and History Review, 32(4), 2014: 733-747.

Mawani, R. “Patterns of Empire and the Politics of Comparison,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, 34(3), 2014: 618-625.

Mawani, R. “Law as Temporality: Colonial Politics and Indian Settlers,” University of California Irvine Law Review, 4(1), 2014: 101-130.

Mawani, R. “Racial Violence and the Cosmopolitan City,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 30(6), 2012: 1083-1102.

Mawani, R. “Law’s Archive,” Annual Review of Law and Social Science, 8, 2012: 337-365.

Mawani, R. “Specters of Indigeneity in British Indian Migration, 1914,” Law and Society Review, 46(2), 2012: 369-403.

Mawani, R. “Half-Breeds, Racial Opacity, and Geographies of Crime: Law’s Search for the ‘Original’ Indian,” Cultural Geographies, 17(4), 2010: 487-506.

Select Book Chapters

Flannery, K., R. Mawani, M. Stelder. “Undercurrents: Towards Ocean Justice.” In K. Flannery, R. Mawani, M. Stelder (eds.). Oceans as Archives (London: Routledge, 2025), 1-21.

Burton, A., R. Mawani & S. Frost, “Introduction: Biocultural Empires as Anti-Colonial Method,” in A. Burton, R. Mawani, & S. Frost (eds), Biocultural Empires: New Histories of Imperial Life Worlds (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2024), 1-32.

Mawani, R. “Gale,” in C. Shaw and E. Turpin (eds.), The Work of Wind: Sea (Berlin: K. Verlag, 2024), 256 – 281.

Mawani, R. “The Law of the Sea: Oceans, Ships, and the Anthropocene,” in P. Burdon and J. Martel (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Law and the Anthropocene (Routledge, 2023), 115-129.

Mawani, R. and M. Stelder, “The Pandemic and the Ship,” in C. Stychin (ed.), Law, Humanities, and the Covid Crisis (London: University of London Press, Jan 2023), 155-178.

Mawani, R. “From Migrants to Revolutionaries: The Komagata Maru’s 1914 ‘Middle Passage’,” in W. Walters, C. Heller, and L. Pezzani (eds.), Viapolitics: Borders, Migration and the Power of Locomotion (Durham: Duke University Press, 2021), 58-83.

Stelder, M. & Mawani, R., “COVID-19 and Quarantine: The Social Construction of Diseased Bodies and the Politics of Containment at Sea,” in K. Lyon (ed.), COVID-19 and Society (Oxford University Press).

Mawani, R. “Postcolonial Legal Studies.” In Mariana Valverde, Kamari M. Clarke, Eve Darian Smith and Prabha Kotiswaran (eds.), Routledge Handbook of Law and Society (Routledge, 2021).

Burton, A. & Mawani, R, “Introduction: Animals, Disruptive Imperial Histories, and the Bestiary Form.” In A. Burton and R. Mawani (eds.), Animalia: An Anti-Imperial Bestiary for our Times (Durham: Duke University Press, 2020),1-16.

Burton A., & Mawani, R. “Some Ways to Read this Book.” In A. Burton and R. Mawani (eds.), Animalia: An Anti-Imperial Bestiary for our Times (Durham: Duke University Press, 2020),17-19

Mawani, R. “C is for Cattle.” In A. Burton and R. Mawani (eds.), Animalia: An Anti-Imperial Bestiary for our Times (Durham: Duke University Press, 2020), 38-44.

Mawani, R. “I is for Ibis.” In A. Burton and R. Mawani (eds.), Animalia: An Anti-Imperial Bestiary for our Times (Durham: Duke University Press, 2020), 88-93.

Mawani, R. “Epilogue: Oceanic Currents and Wayward Lives.” In N. Bose (ed.), South Asian Migrations in Global History: Labour, Law, and Wayward Lives (London: Bloomsbury, 2020), 225-230.

Mawani, R. “Postcolonial Legal Studies.” In S. Stern, M. Del Mar, and B. Meyler (eds.), Oxford Handbook of Law and Humanities (Oxford University Press, 2019), 105-124.

Mawani, R. “The Politics of Empire: Minor History on a Global Scale.” In R. Dhamoon, D. Bhandar, R. Mawani, and S. Bains (eds.). Charting Imperial Itineraries: Unmooring the Komagata Maru (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2019), 280-289.

Mawani, R. “Archival Legal History: Toward the Ocean as Archive,” in Marcus Dubber and Christopher Tomlins (eds.), Oxford Handbook of Legal History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 291-312.

Mawani, R. “Bees, Bedbugs, and Biopolitics,” in Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos (ed.), Law and Theory Handbook (Oxon: Routledge, 2018), 279-295.

Mawani, R. “Ships at Sea,” in Philippe Tortell, Margot Young, and Mark Turin (eds.), Memory Book (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2016), 87-97.

Mawani, R. “Criminal Accusation as Colonial Rule: The Case of Gurdit Singh,” in George Pavlich and Matthew Unger (eds.), Accusation: Creating Criminals (Vancouver: The University of British Columbia Press, 2016), 73-99.

Mawani, R. “Law and Colonialism: Lineages and Legacies,” in Austin Sarat and Patricia Ewick (eds.), Handbook of Law and Society (Wiley-Blackwell, 2015), 417-432.

Mawani, R. “Law and Migration across the Pacific: Narrating the Komagata Maru Outside and Beyond the Nation,” in Adele Perry, Karen Dubinsky, and Henry Yu (eds.) Within and Without the Nation: Canada’s History as Transnational History (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2015), 253-275.

Mawani, R. “Insects, War, Plastic Life.” In Brenna Bhandar and Jonathan Goldberg-Hiller (eds.), Plastic Materialities (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015), 159-188.

• Reprinted in Special issue Journal of American Transnational Studies, Brian Russell Roberts (ed.). “Americanist and Planetary Wormholes: The Insect and America in the World,” 3(2), 2022.

Mawani, R. “Sovereignties in Dispute: The Komagata Maru and Spectral Indigeneities, 1914.” In Shaunnagh Dorsett and John McLaren (eds.), Laws, Engagements, Legacies: Legal Histories of the British Empire (New York and London: Routledge, 2014), 107-123.

Mawani, R. “Screening out Diseased Bodies: Immigration, Mandatory HIV Testing, and the Making of a Healthy Canada,” in A. Bashford (ed.), Medicine at the Border (Palgrave-MacMillan, 2014), 136-158.

Recent Awards

2025
Inaugural Distinguished Alumni Award, Centre for Criminology and Sociolegal Studies, University of Toronto ($500)
Finalist, YWCA Women of Distinction Award, Education and Training

2022 – 2029
Canada Research Chair (Tier I), Colonial Legal Histories ($240k/ year)

2022- 2025
Global Professorial Fellow, School of Law, Queen Mary University of London – This new program aims to recruit “leading scholars from outside the UK appointed to Queen Mary for a period of three years…their role is to engage with colleagues across the Faculty to contribute to innovate interdisciplinary research.” (approx. $32,4400/ year)

2023
Killam Research Prize ($5,000)

2021
Animalia: An Anti-Imperial Bestiary for our Times, Scholarly Typographic Award Association of University Press Designs (with A. Burton)

2020
Honorable Mention, Unmooring the Komagata Maru, Canadian Studies Network Award for Best Collective Work (with R.K. Dhamoon, D. Bhandar, S. Bains)

2020
Winner, Association of Asian American Studies Book Prize for Outstanding Contribution to History. For Across Oceans of Law.

2020
Finalist, U.K. Socio-Legal Studies Association Theory and History Book Prize. For Across Oceans of Law.

2015 – 2016
Wall Scholar, Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies, UBC ($20,000)

2015
Dean of Arts Faculty Research Award ($15,000)

Renisa is interested in supervising graduate students interested in South Asia and the South Asian diaspora; law and colonialism in South and Southeast Asia; the politics of water and hydrocolonialism; multi-species life worlds; imperial shipping; and climate catastrophe in the Indian Ocean world.