Anchita Dasgupta

Anchita Dasgupta, hails from the east Indian city of Kolkata and completed her MPhil in Law with distinction at St Catherine’s College at the University of Oxford. She researches on Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL) and the epistemological decolonisation of the discipline of international law. Her dissertation, supervised by Dr Shreya Atrey at the Bonavero Institute for Human Rights, lies at the cross-section of subaltern studies and critical legal theory, and examines the question of subaltern agency within international law. Through a study of resistance in the postcolony during collective self-determination movements, the dissertation attempts to construct an alternative, agency-centric, and critical framework of international human rights law, that democratizes international law and pushes forward the ulterior goal of its decolonisation. At the Oxford Law Faculty, Anchita acts as a co-convenor for the Decolonising the Law discussion group, hosted by the Bonavero Institute for Human Rights. Anchita also works as a part time researcher for the Oxford Pro Bono Publico.

Anchita graduated with honors from Brown University in Rhode Island, United States where she received a Bachelor of Arts degree in History and Middle East Studies. Sponsored by the Middle East Studies Undergraduate Fellowship, her undergraduate thesis research examined two legal cases heard by the Israeli and Indian apex courts in which anti-state resistance actors weaponized the states' domestic law to claim victories within the streamlined process of the law. In turn, they threw light upon the existence of subaltern agency within the institutional and statist framework of the law. Her thesis won the Brown Center for South Asian Studies Thesis Prize for 2021. 

Anchita has worked as a research assistant to a senior advocate to the Indian Supreme Court, Menaka Guruswamy, as well as renowned Palestinian historian and the current president of Birzeit University, Dr Beshara Doumani. She has also researched for grassroots human rights groups in India. In 2018, she worked as a speechwriter to the President and the Vice President of India at the Indian Ministry of External Affairs. 

Anchita is an active organizer and advocate for Palestinian human rights. She spearheaded the Brown Divest campaign in 2019 that lobbied the Brown Corporation to divest from its holdings in corporations that profited from the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. During her undergraduate studies, Anchita also wrote and edited for several student-run political and academic publications. Her academic writings have been published by journals such as the Georgetown University Undergraduate Law Review, the Undergraduate Law Review at New York University, the Brown Undergraduate Law Review, the Duke Journal for Middle East Studies and the Brown Undergraduate Journal for Middle East Studies.

After wrapping up her degree at Oxford, Anchita has been working as a legal advocacy intern at the Addameer Prisoner Support and Human Rights Association in Palestine, a researcher for the History for Peace initiative run by the Seagull Foundation for the Arts, a legal advisor for the women's rights advocacy movement in the US Cities for CEDAW,  and as a research assistant to Gulika Reddy at the Stanford Law School’s international human rights law clinic. She aspires to continue her research on critical historical frameworks and approaches to international human rights law through a JD in law in the next year, followed by a PhD in the intellectual history of international law.