Senior Fellows 2021-2022

The Baldy Center is pleased to announce the 2021-2022 Senior Fellows. Nick Cheesman from Australian National University begins his fellowship residency in Fall 2021, and Alan Clarke of Utah Valley University will join us in Spring 2022. Their fellowships with the Baldy Center are delayed by one year by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Nick Cheesman, PhD, is a Fellow in the Department of Political & Social Change and a Fellow in the Coral Bell School of Asia Pacific Affairs at Australian National University in Canberra, Australia. He holds a Master’s Degree in Education from University of Western Australia and a PhD from the Department of Political and Social Change at Australian National University. He currently is a series co-editor for the ASAA Southeast Asian Publications Series, and he holds an Australian Research Council grant to study the relation of torture to political order in mainland Southeast Asia. Dr. Cheesman has received numerous awards and prizes for his scholarship and writing. His next book, Myanmar: Politics and society is forthcoming November 2020 from Cambridge University Press. 

Dr. Cheesman’s areas of expertise include law and society, government and politics of Asia and the Pacific, and political theory and political philosophy. His current major project is entitled “Rules of Law in Thailand and Myanmar in comparative historic perspective.” While in residence at the Baldy Center, Cheesman plans to analyze interdisciplinary legal studies on torture, law, and politics. His research “seeks to account for the properties of torture by reference to the political order in which it is imbricated, and in turn, to reveal otherwise obscured particulars of that political order through study of the torture situation, and seeks to develop an interpretation of how torture is made possible in the contemporary world through a variety of juridical and political arrangements.” He plans to offer a new interpretation of the constitutive relationship between torture, law and politics.

Alan Clarke, JD, PhD, is a Professor at the Integrated Studies Program, Utah Valley University in Orem, Utah. He holds a Juris Doctor from the College of William and Mary, an L.L. M from Queen’s University, and a PhD from Osgoode Hall Law School, York University. He practiced law after graduating from William and Mary, with a focus on social justice broadly construed, including, civil rights, voting rights, labor organizing, poverty law, and death penalty post-conviction process. Dr. Clarke’s academic research since 1997 has revolved around several broad, connected themes in international and transnational criminal law and human rights, criminology and criminal justice policy, civil rights, legal history, law and society, and critical legal studies, climate change and survival refugees.

Dr. Clarke plans to analyze the interdisciplinary legal studies on the boundaries of human rights, international criminal law, immigration law, demography, human and cultural geography, political science, sociology and philosophy during his Baldy Center Senior Fellowship. He will focus specifically on policy and legal responses to human migration and refugees caused or influenced by climate change. He will contribute to the growing literature on the subject of climate change survival refugees and plans to argue for a response utilizing a combination of strategies.