Prof. Catherine O'Rourke

Catherine O'Rourke is Full Professor of International Law at Dublin City University School of Law and Government and Principal Investigator of the European Research Council €2m Consolidator Grant 'Centring Care in International Law' (2025-2030). She researches, teaches and engages in policy work in the fields of gender, conflict and international law. She works with the Irish and UK governments, the United Nations and several non-governmental organisations. As a scholar, she has a noted record of publications and research grants. From 2021-2025, Catherine was Professor of Global Law at Durham Law School in the UK. Catherine is the former Director (2020-21) and Gender Research Coordinator (2010-20) of the Transitional Justice Institute and Senior Lecturer in Human Rights and International Law at Ulster University School of Law. Her academic awards include the Kevin Boyle Book Prize for Outstanding Legal Scholarship 2020-21 from the Irish Association of Law Teachers for her monograph 'Women's Rights in Armed Conflict under International Law' (Cambridge, 2020), which also received Honorable Mention in the American Society of International Law-Women in International Law Interest Group Scholarship Prize, an Irish Fulbright Scholar Award (2016), an Ulster University Distinguished Researcher Award (2019), and the 2010 Basil Chubb Prize, for the best PhD in politics from an Irish university, which was published as 'Gender Politics in Transitional Justice' (Routledge, 2013).

Catherine is regularly commissioned by intergovernmental and non-governmental organisations to conduct expert research on gender and conflict, such as commissioned research on gender and reparations by UN Women and the Office of the High Commission on Human Rights, subsequently published in Harvard Human Rights Journal ‘Transforming Reparations for Conflict-related Sexual Violence: Principles and Practice’. More recently, she was commissioned as an expert to support the work of the International Criminal Court Trust Fund for Victims in designing a reparations implementation plan in response to the Court's reparation decision in the Lubanga case. Other commissioned work includes the UN Women Guidebook on CEDAW and the Women, Peace and Security Resolutions (with Aisling Swaine).