Dr Shailesh Kumar is an interdisciplinary socio-legal researcher and academic, a criminologist, and an ethnographer based at the Department of Law and Criminology, Royal Holloway, University of London (RHUL). His research and teaching are at the intersection of Criminal Law and Criminology, Public Law and Policymaking, Legal Anthropology, Law and Visual Culture, Socio-Legal Theory, and South Asia Studies. His research works have been cited by several scholars. He has previously taught at the University of East London (as a Lecturer in Law and Criminology), where he convened several core and optional modules for Law, Criminology, and Policing students and supervised an LLM dissertation. He has also taught at SOAS (School of Oriental and African Studies), University of London, as a Teaching Fellow of Criminal Law, and at Birkbeck College, University of London as a Tutor of Law and Criminology.

For over three years, he has been teaching a wide range of core and optional modules in the UK such as Criminal Law, Criminal Justice Process, Policing and Criminal Investigation, Race, Ethnicity, Crime and Justice, Constitutional and Administrative Law, Legal Theory, Social Research Methods, Research Skills, Legal Systems & Methods, Law of the European Union, and Contract Law, to UG and PG students of law and criminology. 

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He finished his PhD as a Commonwealth Scholar funded by the UK government from Birkbeck Law School. His PhD thesis is a qualitative empirical study of the experiences and perceptions of stakeholders (Judicial Officers, Public Prosecutors, Defence Counsels et. al.) regarding the substantive and procedural reforms brought in the area of child sexual violence in India through the POCSO (Protection of Children from Sexual Offences) Act 2012. He has extensive experience in conducting qualitative fieldwork, for example, interviews and participant observation, and ethnographic study of courts, in South Asia. 

He has been teaching both full-time and part-time students from diverse socio-economic, educational and professional backgrounds, including mature and working students. His students come from diverse socio-economic-professional communities such as Tube drivers, fund managers, librarians, PhD students, care workers, lawyers, paralegals, former and current bureaucrats, doctors, chefs, postdoctoral students, full-time parents and even grandparents. He loves teaching them, and in that process learning from them, and takes pride in it. 

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"So long as you do not achieve social liberty, whatever freedom is provided by the law is of no avail to you."

Dr. B. R. Ambedkar