Kun Fan

Kun Fan is Professor at the School of Private & Commercial Law, UNSW Sydney, where she teaches and researches mediation, arbitration and comparative legal studies, and, since January 2026, acting co-Director of the Herbert Smith Freehills China International Business and Economic Law (CIBEL) Centre. She joined UNSW in 2019 and was promoted to full Professor in 2026. She was previously Associate Professor at the Faculty of Law of McGill University, where she was named Norton Rose Fulbright Faculty Scholar in Arbitration & Commercial Law in 2017, and Assistant Professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. She has been a Visiting Scholar at the Harvard-Yenching Institute, at the Université Paris Panthéon-Assas and at the Singapore International Dispute Resolution Academy, and scholar-in-residence at WilmerHale in London.

Having studied and worked in China, Singapore, the United States, Switzerland, France, Hong Kong, Canada and Australia, and trained in both the common law and civil law traditions, she brings to each dispute a close understanding of how legal cultures meet.

Alongside her academic work, Professor Fan has acted as arbitrator, counsel, legal expert and tribunal secretary in international arbitrations and domain name disputes. As Deputy Counsel at the ICC International Court of Arbitration, she oversaw more than one hundred ICC arbitrations. She is an accredited mediator of the Hong Kong Mediation Accreditation Association, a domain name panelist of HKIAC, ADNDRC and CIETAC, a panel arbitrator of the Shanghai International Economic and Trade Arbitration Commission (SHIAC), the Beijing Arbitration Commission, the Hainan International Arbitration Court, the Zhuhai Arbitration Commission (International Arbitration Court) and the Nanjing Arbitration Commission, and an arbitrator, mediator and APEC neutral of eBRAM. See her practice.

Her research, including several funded projects led as principal investigator, focuses on alternative dispute resolution. She is the author of Arbitration in China: A Legal and Cultural Analysis (Hart Publishing, 2013) and has published widely in leading international journals. Her work has been recognised by the China Arbitration Research Institute (Best Research Outputs in Arbitration Theory, 2015), the Chinese University of Hong Kong (Support for High-impact Scholarship, 2013–2014) and the Swiss Network for International Studies (Best Thesis in International Studies, 2011), and she was named a finalist for Academic of the Year at the Australian Law Awards in 2021. Browse her publications.