Ronan Lee
Ronan Lee is a Vice-Chancellor Independent Research Fellow at Loughborough University London’s Institute for Media and Creative Industries and the author of “Myanmar’s Rohingya Genocide: Identity, History and Hate Speech” (Bloomsbury/IB Tauris). His work focusses on Asian politics, genocide, hate speech and migration. In 2021 Ronan was awarded the Early Career Emerging Scholar Prize by the International Association of Genocide Scholars.
Ronan has been awarded a 2024-2026 Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellowship to undertake a research project titled "Surviving Genocide: Rohingya Refugees’ Priorities for a Post-Genocide Future". This research will be situated in Rohingya refugee camps in Bangladesh adjacent to the Myanmar frontier and will involve in-depth interviews, focus groups, surveys, discourse analysis and observation to map Rohingya attitudes towards education, marriage, work, language, justice, religion, migration/repatriation and politics. Through the 'Rohingya Futures' project that he initiated, Ronan publishes books of poetry by Rohingya authors.
He was formerly a Queensland State Member of Parliament and served on the frontbench as a Parliamentary Secretary in portfolios including Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Partnerships, Justice and Youth, and has been a Visiting Scholar at Queen Mary University of London’s School of Law and the International State Crime Initiative.
Ronan’s doctoral research involved conducting long-term field work in Bangladesh, Myanmar, and Thailand during 2014-2017 focussed on the identity, history, and politics of the Rohingya. This work aimed to amplify the voice of Rohingya participants and involved in-depth interviews with Rohingya in Myanmar’s Rakhine State, in Yangon, in the Bangladesh camps, and among the Rohingya diaspora living further afield from Myanmar. Ronan won Deakin University's 2015 Neil Archbold Memorial Medal for his journal article "A Politician, Not an Icon: Aung San Suu Kyi's Silence on Myanmar's Muslim Rohingya" in the journal Islam and Christian-Muslim Relations.
