Dr Kanika Sharma

Dr Sharma is a legal historian of colonial South Asia, interested in three distinct fields of legal study: the development of women’s rights in India, the use of images and architecture by the law, and the creation of racial difference under colonial law.

In the field of women’s rights in India, she has worked extensively on the issue of child marriage, ideas of sexual consent, the legal doctrine of restitution of conjugal rights. and on the life and trial of India’s first female doctor, Dr Rukhmabai. Her co-written article on the Rukhmabai case offered a rewritten feminist judgment located in 1886 and won the Indian Law Review Best Article Prize 2021. For her contributions to legal history, she has been awarded an Associate Fellowship of the Royal Historical Society.

Her second key area of research is the use of images and architecture by the law.  She has written extensively on the Gandhi Murder Trial, particularly the use of architecture within the trial, as well as the ways in which calendar art of 20^th century India played a role in shaping citizen’s relation to the law. Led by her interest in law and images, much of her recent work focuses on the reintroduction of cameras in the courtrooms in India and the UK in the 21st C. Her co-edited collection on cameras in the courtroom brings together chapters on this theme from countries across the world (forthcoming with Routledge). 

Kanika has also published on the creation of racial difference under colonial law, and the ways in which the rule of law doctrine served to construct, operationalise, and legitimise racial hierarchies. Her new work turns to colonial anthropological photography as a site that produces racial difference and the law. 

At SOAS, Kanika convenes the LLB core module Legal Systems of Asia and Africa 1: Concepts and Structures; Religion and the Law in South Asia (LLB); and Law, Religion, and the State in South Asia (LLM). She also co-convenes Gender and the Law (LLB). She has previously taught on the Public Law and Equity modules at SOAS and is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy.

She welcomes PhD proposals for projects that wish to examine issues of sexual consent and women’s rights in India (in the contemporary era and/or their historical development); to analyse the use of images and architecture by the law; and in the field of colonial legal history of South Asia broadly understood. More theoretical proposals on psychoanalytic jurisprudence, constitutional law, law and legal subjectivity, and other aspects of critical legal theory are also welcome.

Law and colonialism; Law and society in South Asia (especially gender issues); Law, image, and architecture; Psychoanalytic jurisprudence; Critical legal theory