Rate My Professor Lia Kent

Lia Kent is an Associate Professor and Australian Research Council Future Fellow, as well as a Senior Fellow, in the School of Regulation and Global Governance (RegNet) in the College of Asia and the Pacific at The Australian National University. She holds a PhD in Socio-legal Studies from the University of Melbourne, awarded in 2011, with a thesis entitled "Justice is Yet to Come: Rethinking the Dynamics of Transitional Justice in East Timor." Kent's research centers on interdisciplinary peace and conflict studies, exploring how communities make sense of legacies of state violence and protracted conflict. She examines local practices of social repair and their intersections with state-building and peacebuilding priorities pursued by states and international actors. Her work addresses key themes including peacebuilding, state formation, transitional justice, reconciliation, gender justice, memory politics, necro-politics, and missing persons. This research draws on long-term ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Timor-Leste since 2004, as well as in Aceh, Indonesia, and Sri Lanka.

Kent leads several major research projects, including her Australian Research Council Future Fellowship project on local responses to missing persons and post-conflict peacebuilding (2021–2025), Innovative approaches to missing persons: lessons from Bougainville (2024–2025, Principal Investigator), and Exploring the separation and reunification experiences of East Timorese 'stolen children' and their biological families (2022–2023, Principal Investigator). She serves as Co-Investigator on the Heritage and Reconciliation project (2020–2025) and previously led Memory Activism in Australia and the Asia-Pacific (2018–2021). Her publications include the monograph The Unruly Dead: Spirits, Memory and State Formation in Timor-Leste (University of Wisconsin Press, 2024), the article "The dead as memory workers" in Memory Studies (2024), and the edited volume Civil Society and Transitional Justice in Asia and the Pacific (ANU Press). Kent's ARC Future Fellowship recognizes her impactful contributions to these fields.