Brenna Bhandar

critical legal theorist and scholar

Brenna Bhandar’s primary research has centered on the colonial foundations of modern law, taking property (broadly conceived) as its main focus.

This research culminated in the publication of Colonial Lives of Property: Law, Land and Racial Regimes of Ownership (2018), which excavates the co-emergence of racial subjectivities and modern property law in various settler colonies. She examines how from the eighteenth century onward, prevailing concepts of race and racial difference, understood as always gendered in ways specific to each context, were forged in conjunction with economic ideologies that rendered race contingent on particular forms of labor and property relations—captured by the term “racial regimes of ownership.”