Dr Maria Giannacopoulos (she/her)  is Associate Professor and Director of the Centre for Criminology Law and Justice in the School of Law, Society and Criminology.  She holds a BA(Hons) LLB (Hons) and a PhD in Cultural Studies and is a leading scholar in decolonising approaches to law and criminology. 

Maria is a Greek-Australian academic born and raised on Gadigal land and recognised internationally for pioneering grounded theoretical approaches for understanding law's relationship to colonial power and its expanding carcerality.  The Greek language is her mother tongue despite being Australia born, and so she formed an early interest in the politics of languages, meanings and cultures.  

Prior to joining UNSW Law and Justice in 2022, she taught law, sociolegal studies and criminology at Flinders University on Kaurna Country, Adelaide for over a decade. In 2020 she was the recipient of the Vice Chancellors Award for Excellence in Teaching and was recognised as a leading research-led educator working to decolonise the discipline of criminology by addressing global questions of Indigenous and racial justice.  

In 2023 she delivered the prestigious annual John Barry Lecture in Criminology at the University of Melbourne titled ‘Law Reform and Sovereign Refusal in the Colonial Debtscape’ and was shortlisted for the Law, Literature and Humanities Prize for her article ‘White Law/ Black Deaths: Nomocide and the foundational absence of consent in Australian Law’.  She is the special issue editor (with Kristopher Wilson and Rhys Aston) of volume 27 of Law Text Culture on the theme of ‘Imagining Decolonised Law’.