ProfessorDanielle Celermajer

I am a Professor of Sociology and Criminology at the University of Sydney, Deputy Director of the Sydney Environment Institute and lead of the Multispecies Justice project. My research focus today is on Multispecies Justice, or how the concepts, practices and institutionalisation of justice need to be transformed to take into account ecological realities and the ethical standing of all Earth beings.

A longtime human rights activist, before joining the academy I was head of Indigenous policy at the Australian Human Rights Commission and worked in grass roots democratization and human rights movements in Central America. As a human right scholar, my books include Sins of the Nation and the Ritual of Apology and The Prevention of Torture: An Ecological Approach (both with Cambridge University Press 2008 and 2018), with Richard Sherwin, A Cultural History of Law in the Modern Age (Bloomsbury 2019), with Alex Lefebvre, the Subject of Human Rights (Stanford University Press 2020), and with Moira Gatens and Millicent Churcher, Institutional Transformations: Imagination, Embodiment, and Affect (Routledge 2021).

In recent years, and very much in light of the ecological and animal crisis, I have turned my attention to injustices and violence against the more than human. Through the experience of living through the black summer bushfires with a multispecies community, I began writing about a new crime of our age, Omnicide. My latest book, Summertime (Penguin Random House, 2021) was written in recognition of the critical urgency of conveying the complex conceptual recognition of the multispecies harms of the climate catastrophe in ways that can provoke affect and hence action. Summertime was shortlisted for the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards for non-fiction.

My most recent publication, written with other members of the Multispecies Justice Collective is Institutionalising Multispecies Justice (Cambridge University Press, 2025). I have a forthcoming book with Professor Roseemary Lyster and A/Professor Phillipa McCormack entitles Multispecies Climate Justice, Disasters and Responsibility with Edward Elgar. 

I write in a range of genres, including research monographs and articles, long and short form opinion pieces, creative non-fiction and memoir.