James Parker

James Parker is an Associate Professor at Melbourne Law School, University of Melbourne, serving as Director of the research program on Law, Sound and the International at the Institute for International Law and the Humanities. He earned his PhD from Melbourne Law School in 2013 and a Masters (Coursework and Research) from McGill University. His career encompasses roles as Senior Lecturer in Law at the University of Melbourne, ARC Discovery Early Career Researcher Award fellow, visiting fellow at the Program on Science, Technology and Society at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, faculty member at the Harvard Law School Institute for Global Law and Policy Workshop, associate curator at Liquid Architecture—an Australian organisation for artists working with sound—and member of the advisory board for Earshot, an NGO specialising in audio forensics. Parker teaches courses in evidence, criminal law, legal theory, ethics, and science, technology, and society across JD and Masters programs, and supervises doctoral students on critical projects concerning law's relations to sound and listening, legal aesthetics, the courtroom, evidence and forensics, science and technology, surveillance, and contemporary warfare.

Parker's research focuses on the relations between law, sound, and listening, with emphasis on international criminal law, the law of war, and privacy. His monograph Acoustic Jurisprudence: Listening to the Trial of Simon Bikindi (Oxford University Press, 2015) received the Penny Pether Prize for early career scholarship in law, literature, and the humanities in 2017. Key publications also include Sonic Lawfare: On the Jurisprudence of Weaponised Sound (2018), Gavel in Objects of International Law (2018), A Lexicon of Law and Listening (2020), and Forensic Listening in Lawrence Abu Hamdan’s Saydnaya (the missing 19dB) (2020). He has provided media commentary for ABC, BBC, and CNN on topics including police use of the Long Range Acoustic Device and alleged sonic attacks at the US Embassy in Cuba in 2017. Parker has given public lectures and performances at Harvard University, Rietveld Academy, Gertrude Contemporary, firstdraft, Westspace, and the Institute of Modern Art in Brisbane. He co-curated the Eavesdropping project—a collaboration between Liquid Architecture and Melbourne Law School featuring exhibitions, public programs, and working groups on the politics of listening—in 2018 at the Ian Potter Museum of Art and 2019 at City Gallery Wellington. Since 2020, he has collaborated on Machine Listening, a platform for research and artistic experimentation on emerging forms of listening.

Professional Email: parker@unimelb.edu.au