Professor Jennifer Balint

Professor Jennifer Balint is Dean of the Faculty of Arts.

Professor Balint joined the University of Melbourne in 2002, establishing Australia’s first Socio-Legal Studies program. Professor Balint has held many leadership roles at the University, including as Head of the School of Social and Political Sciences.

Professor Balint holds a Bachelor of Arts (Honours) and Bachelor of Laws (Honours) from Macquarie University, and a PhD from the Law Program, Research School of Social Sciences at the Australian National University.

Throughout her career, Professor Balint’s approach to academic practice and leadership has included forging strong partnerships with industry, government, and community organisations, including creating opportunities for students to engage with our external partners. Her work is focused on the development of models to address institutional harm and effect structural change. She holds a deep commitment to fostering collaboration and innovation, and academic excellence. Her work as a leader and academic is motivated by what does a just society look like, what is our responsibility to shape it, and who do we need to bring together to enable it.

She co-established the Minutes of Evidence project, a collaboration between Indigenous and non-Indigenous researchers, education experts, performance artists, community members, government and community organisations to spark public conversations about structural justice, the relationship between the colonial past and the present and just futures. This generated the verbatim theatre production Coranderrk: We Will Show the Country, new education curricula for high schools, and Keeping Hold of Justice: Encounters between Law and Colonialism (University of Michigan Press 2020, with Julie Evans, Mark McMillan and Nesam McMillan). She is the author of Genocide, State Crime and the Law: In the Name of the State and has worked extensively on accountability for state crime and access to justice. Professor Balint collaborates with the Universitas Gadjah Mada in Indonesia in teaching and research. She is currently collaborating with social and legal service and community organisations on the Access to Justice project, that seeks to address and understand new ways of enabling access to justice for newly arrived, migrant and refugee communities.

She is a second-Dan black belt who loves time with her family, the bush and the sea.