DoctorShea Esterling

Shea is a Senior Lecturer Above the Bar in the Faculty of Law at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand. She holds a JD from the Indiana University Maurer School of Law and a diploma in International Humanitarian Law from the International Committee of the Red Cross. She completed her PhD at Aberystwyth University. Her research is at the intersection of human rights and cultural heritage law with focus on the rights of Indigenous Peoples. Themes explored in her research include those related to cultural genocide, cultural identity, cultural property, essentialism, self-determination and restitution.

She has been an invited guest lecturer at the Central European University, the University of Louvain and the University of Malta. She has taught courses on international law, human rights and indigenous rights. In recognition of her teaching excellence, she is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (FHEA). Shea also has spoken at numerous conferences and is published across a wide range of subjects.

In 2018, Shea was selected by the Australian & New Zealand Society of International Law as the Early Career Research to represent New Zealand at the Seventh International Four Societies Conference, which supports outstanding new and emerging researchers in international law. In 2022, Shea took up the award of a Canterbury Fellowship at Oxford. With this fellowship, she spent three months as a Research Visitor at the Bonavero Institute of Human Rights at the University of Oxford. While in residence, she completed her manuscript, which examines the relationship between indigenous rights and cultural heritage.

She served as the Co-Chair for the American Society of International Law Rights of Indigenous Peoples Interest Group from 2021-24 and is the current Chair of the Cultural Heritage and the Arts Interest Group for the American Society of International Law.

Shea is author of Indigenous Cultural Property and International Law: Restitution, Rights and Wrongs (Oxon: Routledge) 2024.