School staff

Kathryn Wells, Thomas More Law School, Canberra Campus

Kathryn Wells is a part-time Lecturer co-ordinating a project for Indigenous Pre-Law, Justice and Human Rights Programs in the Thomas More Law School. She is a final-year PhD scholar in Indigenous History studying her Graduate Certificate in Law at ANU. Her areas of expertise include Indigenous education policies and curriculum design, Indigenous data sovereignty and intellectual property strategies, repatriation of land claim collections, autochthonous rights and imperialism, and modern Indigenous political movements for citizenship, human, civil and land rights. She has held appointments as a Research Fellow at Charles Darwin University and the University of Canberra, and worked as a tutor at the Australian National University. She has edited a book and published in a number of peer-reviewed journals including the Alternative Law Journal.

For four decades Kathryn worked across national cultural institutions and for Aboriginal organisations especially, in the NT including the Northern Land Council with reference to the Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Act 1976. Prior she worked as an advisor to both the Secretary and Minister for Aboriginal Affairs 1986 to 1987, especially on the Mabo claim. From 1993 to 2003, she was a strategic analyst on Indigenous Cultural and Intellectual Property Rights, including advising Australia's Attorney-General, DFAT and the UN World Intellectual Property Organisation. Working in government for a decade from 2003, she won awards for collaborative arts and culture projects: the Kalagoorlie Western Desert Region Arts Initiative, the Musée de Quai de Branly, Paris project and an Indigenous OpenSearch data project across various Australian cultural institutions.