Dr Surabhi Shukla

Surabhi works on law and sexuality with a focus on India. She is interested in exploring the social afterlife of legal judgments and the lived experiences of legal institutions. Her work has recently been cited in the Indian Supreme Court’s judicial training manual on LGBTQIA+ issues for magistrates, judges, and judicial staff. For the last six years she has been blogging on SOGI cases in Indian courts, providing quick and crisp summaries of the latest adventures of law in queer life: www.lawandsexuality.com

Surabhi likes to explore artistic ways of demonstrating her research so that it reaches the intended audience. In 2014 she conducted a year-long study on the experiences of gender non-conforming students in Indian schools through a IASSCS Emerging Scholars’ Fellowship. With the aid of animation, short stories, model school policies, and a customised website, she has made the findings and further resources available for parents, teachers, and school students so that bullying can come to an end. This project has since won the Jack Collins Social Action Bursary of the Oriel College Oxford which helped her conduct school visits in her hometown to discuss her findings. The website can be found here: https://genderdiversityinschools.com/

At Sheffield, she has launched the Lectures on Gender and Sexuality in the winter of 2023 with the aim of informing public debate through research. The series invites contemporary scholars working on questions of sexuality and gender to Sheffield to share their latest research on cutting-edge topics with the staff, students, and the members of the public at large. More information on the series is here.

She also has a sustained interest in traditional constitutional law in which she completed her doctorate. Her doctoral dissertation looked at the prevalence of religious and cultural claims at the frontiers of fundamental rights—same-sex marriage, euthanasia, surrogacy, sex-work and so on. In short, those human rights cases which are not right to religion cases but somehow always attract passionate religious and cultural contestations. The thesis examines these arguments, studies their attributes, and asks to what extent is it constitutionally legitimate for courts to take them into consideration when arriving at a decision. This work is currently being revised for publication. Correspondence for discussions, including access to the thesis, is very welcome.

She is committed to working with queer communities and in that regard has had the opportunity to work with the ACLU, The Williams Institute, and The Centre for Justice, Law and Society (CJLS) at the Jindal University in India. Before coming to the UK in 2016, she was an Assistant Professor and Assistant Director of the CJLS at Jindal and worked at the Indian Supreme Court and Jagori, the latter one of the oldest women’s rights NGOs in India. Before coming over to Sheffield, she was a lecturer at the Manchester Metropolitan University between 2021 and 2022 and taught as a Senior Teaching Fellow at SOAS from 2021-2023.

She invites robust research proposals for PhD supervisions in any of the areas mentioned above.