Surabhi Ranganathan is a University Senior Lecturer in International Law, a Deputy Director of the Lauterpacht Centre for International Law, and a Fellow and Director of Studies in Law at King's College. She is also a fellow of the Cambridge Centre for Environment, Energy and Natural Resource Governance (C-EENRG). Her research explores histories and politics of international law, with a current focus on the designation, representations and regulation of global commons, especially the deep seabed.

To know more about her research, you might read her interview, Garret Hardin, Arvid Pardo and the Fascinations of Interdisciplinarity (pp. 28-33); listen to her interview, Big Blue Juridical Planet on Fool's Utopia; hear the podcast of her talk Unmaking the Ocean delivered at Oxford, or watch the video of her Snyder Lecture: The Legal Construction of the Ocean at the University of Indiana. Short pieces authored by her include Techno-Utopia of the Deep on CUP's fifteeneightyfour blog; a sequence of seven short essays Interfaces of Land and Sea written as part of a project on Visualizing Climate and History hosted at the Center for History and Economics at Harvard; and an editorial Seasteads, Land-grabs and International Law for Leiden Journal of International Law. You might also enjoy this conversation on different approaches to international law between Professor Andrea Bianchi and her, hosted by the Max Planck Institute Luxembourg. 

Surabhi is the author of Strategically Created Treaty Conflicts and the Politics of International Law (Cambridge University Press), a study of international legal thought and practice, exploring treaty conflicts in nuclear governance, the law of the sea, and international criminal justice. To find out more, please look up the roundtable on the book hosted by Volkerrechtsblog, with contributions from Judge James Crawford, Professor Jan Klabbers, Dr Lea Wisken and Dr Jasper Finke, and a response from the author, or hear this recording. She is the asst. editor of The Cambridge Companion to International Law. Her work has appeared in numerous journals, including the British Yearbook of International Law, American Journal of International Law and European Journal of International Law. Her research has been selected for presentation at the peer-reviewed NYU/Nottingham/Melbourne Junior Faculty Forum for International Law and Stanford International Junior Faculty Forum. 

Surabhi was an Assistant Professor at the University of Warwick, a Junior Research Fellow at King's College and Lauterpacht Centre for International Law, Cambridge, and an Institute Fellow and Program Officer at the Institute for International Law and Justice, NYU School of Law, where she worked on projects relating to the regulation of Private Military and Security Companies, and Global Administrative Law.

She received her B.A., LL.B. (Hons.) from the National Law School of India University, her LL.M. from NYU School of Law, where she was a Vanderbilt Scholar, and her Ph.D. from Cambridge University, where she was a Gates Scholar, an Overseas Research Scholar, and JC Hall Scholar at St. John's College. She has clerked for the Supreme Court of India, and interned with UNHCR, UNICEF, the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India, and the Central Empowered Committee for the Environment established by the Supreme Court of India. 

Currently co-editor of the International Legal Theory Section of the Leiden Journal of International Law, and a notes editor of the Cambridge Law Journal, Surabhi has also served in editorial roles on the British Yearbook of International Law and the Cambridge Student Law Review. Together with Dr Megan Donaldson and (from January 2020) Professor Annabel Brett, Surabhi convenes Legal Histories Beyond the State, a seminar that brings together historians, political theorists and lawyers to discuss the social, economic and political dimensions of law in the modern and early modern periods. 

Surabhi's research is available on SSRN; she tweets at @SurabhiRanganat