Danish Sheikh is a Senior Lecturer at Monash Law School. His work examines how law shapes queerness, and how queer communities, in turn, creatively reshape law through resistance. He approaches these questions by developing performance as a method of legal inquiry, drawing on queer theory, theatre and performance studies, and law and humanities scholarship. A central concern of his work is how queer creativity unsettles inherited assumptions about legal pedagogy and legal method.

Danish is the author of Love and Reparation, which restages the litigation challenging India’s sodomy law through a hybrid form combining courtroom transcripts, archival research, and personal memoir. His research on the legal regulation of sexuality has been cited by the Supreme Court of India in its decision to decriminalise homosexuality. His forthcoming monograph, Lawful Repair: Reimagining Law through Queer Dissent, to be published by Duke University Press, advances an account of repair as a method of queer legal dissent. His work has received several awards, including the Law, Literature and Humanities Association of Australasia’s Early Career Researcher Article Prize (2023) and Postgraduate Paper Prize (2021).

Alongside his scholarly work, Danish is a theatre practitioner who approaches performance as a site of jurisprudential and pedagogical experimentation. His lecture-performance Much to Do With Law, But More to Do With Love, won the 2025 Queer Playwriting Award and was presented at Gasworks Arts Park as part of Midsumma Festival 2026. His plays have also been nominated for the Bruntwood Prize and the Hindu Playwriting Award. 

Before joining Monash, Danish was a Lecturer at La Trobe Law School. He has also worked with the Alternative Law Forum in Bangalore and the International Commission of Jurists, and served as a consultant with the United Nations Development Programme on projects relating to legal gender recognition across Asia. He holds law degrees from NALSAR University of Law, Hyderabad and the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, which he attended on a Grotius Fellowship, and was awarded his PhD by the University of Melbourne.