Associate Professor Nesam McMillan serves as Associate Professor of Global Criminology in the School of Social and Political Sciences, Faculty of Arts, at the University of Melbourne. She earned her PhD from the University of Melbourne, complemented by studies abroad at the University of Nottingham in the UK and the University of California, Berkeley in the USA, as well as a visiting scholarship at the Vrije Universiteit in the Netherlands. McMillan's research critically examines social, legal, and political responses to events of mass harm, with a focus on the ethics of international engagement with the suffering of others. Drawing on postcolonial theory, her work charts how mass harm is culturally understood and practically addressed, attending to historical and cultural dynamics in contemporary international responses. She has conducted empirical research in Rwanda, the Netherlands, and Belgium, exploring the nature and effects of constructing certain events as distinctly international or criminal issues. Her academic interests encompass community responses to harm, international crime, justice and responsibility, mass atrocity and genocide, transitional justice, postcolonial and settler colonial harms, peacekeeping and war, and counter-terrorism.

Prior to her current role, McMillan held the position of Lecturer in Global Criminology at the University of Melbourne. She engages in collaborative, community-engaged, and practice-oriented research. Notable publications include her monograph Imagining the International: Crime, Justice, and the Promise of Community (2016), the co-authored book Keeping Hold of Justice: Encounters between Law and Colonialism from Structural Injustice to Structural Justice (2022, with Jennifer Balint, Julie Evans, and Mark McMillan), Rethinking Transitional Justice, Redressing Indigenous Harm: A New Conceptual Approach (2014, International Journal of Transitional Justice, with Jennifer Balint), and Sites of Violence, Sites of Peace, Sites of Justice: Transforming the Relational Landscape of Yogyakarta (2022). McMillan contributes to interdisciplinary projects such as the Minutes of Evidence project, which creates collaborative fields of engagement with past, present, and future structural injustices. Her scholarship influences discussions on global criminology and structural justice.

Professional Email: nesamcm@unimelb.edu.au