Dr Darcy Leigh is a Lecturer in Law at the University of Sussex, with a background in International Relations. Darcy’s research addresses the legacies of European settler colonialism and eugenics for today’s international politics of race, gender and sexuality. This includes researching the coloniality, antisemitism and transmisogyny of the resurgent right – as well as Indigenous, Jewish, trans and queer social movements’ resistance. Prior to arriving at Sussex, Darcy was a Teaching Fellow and/or Research Assistant at the University of Edinburgh, University of Ottawa and University of Alberta. Darcy’s PhD thesis won the 2016 British International Studies Association’s 2016 prize for ‘best thesis’. At Sussex Law School, Darcy teaches queer and decolonial approaches to international law, human rights, development, critical theory, security, and research methods. Her teaching is informed by her experiences in social movements, where she learnt the value of as well as methods for participatory and creative pedagogy. Darcy was part of the teams that won the 2019 Advance HE award for ‘collaborative teaching excellence’, and the 2022 Pearson HE award for ‘most innovative approach to supporting student’. She has also been an organiser or facilitator with radical decolonial education projects (e.g. Queer Yeshiva, Dechinta Centre for Research and Learning, and the Akitsiraq Law School) and co-runs an autonomous insurrectionary transfeminist press.

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Where do you see the most exciting research/debates happening in your field?

For the last ten years I’ve been researching the coloniality of the resurgent right, with a focus on its settler colonial, antisemitic and transmisogynist dimensions. Perhaps I should say immediately that I don’t see the ‘resurgent right’ as a break from the liberalism we were all talking about ten years ago, but rather as reconfiguration of that colonial liberal international order – sometimes I get frustrated with being put on ‘the far right panel’ as if it can or should be separated out. Anyway, at the moment I’m working on a monograph emerging from this research exploring what I call ‘free speech nationalism’, its contestation, and alternative transnational politics of ‘freedom’ and ‘expression’. I’m also in the early stages of a project about Jewish decolonial, trans and mad international politics, which looks at how Jews have been agents, objects and opponents of British settler colonialism. All of which is to say: my work spans multiple fields and I get to read a lot of exciting research! 

In IR, I’ve been reading scholarship on psychiatry and madness (especially Laura Jung’s and Alison Howell’s work), transness and queerness (including Béatrice Châteauvert-Gagnon’s recent article, Cai Wilkinson’s work, and Rahul Rao’s book Out of Time), and race (not least Nadya Ali’s book, the Violence of Britishness). Work bringing Stuart Hall into IR, such as Alexander Stoffel and Ida Roland Birkvad’s article, has been useful for researching a political field that uses obfuscation and misrepresentation as central strategies, as these bring particular challenges for academic understanding and representation. Hall offers a way to take seriously the realm of ideas and ‘discourse’ without buying into it – e.g. of understanding the significance of a moral panic about free speech or trans people without reproducing the terms of that moral panic. The Stoffel and Birkvad piece also summarizes an exciting range of Marxist, decolonial and transfeminist literature, if you are looking for more. As I’m dreaming up a Jewish diasporist IR, I’ve also got my eye on other scholars reimagining IR, especially Faiz Sheikh’s Islam and International Relations and Robbie Shilliam’s work on Rastafari movements. 

Beyond IR, as much of my work is historical in one way or another, I read a lot of history. I’ve recently been reading (sometimes overlapping) Jewish and trans history, trying to make the links with European colonialisms. David Sorkin’s recent book on Jewish ‘emancipation’ is on the surface a very long list of legal changes relating to Jews across five centuries. Yet it was quite a thrilling read, telling the story of the establishment of the European international order in a new way. I think I will be returning to this book for a long time. Max Keiser’s ‘Jewish Antifascism and the False Promise of Settler Colonialism’ and Santiago Slabodsky’s ‘Decolonial Judaism: Triumphal Failures of Barbaric Thinking’ similarly explore the entanglement of Jewish diaspora with antisemitism, colonization and statehood, while the magazine Jewish Currents does this for a more popular/political audience. In terms of trans history, C. Riley Snorton’s Black on Both Sides and Jules Gill........

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