Isabella Alexander is a legal historian and intellectual property scholar, whose research explores how laws inform and regulate the creation, circulation and reception of knowledge and culture from an historical perspective. She researches and teaches in intellectual property law and legal history, specialising in the law of copyright.

A Professor in the Faculty of Law at UTS, Isabella is the lead Chief Investigator on the ARC Discovery grant, Hacking Copyright Law in the 21st Century: Art, Law, History and Technology, investigating the tensions that underlie the legal treatment of visual works of art. She is sole CI on the ARC Discovery grant Copyright and Cartography: Understanding the past, shaping the future, uncovering the history of copyright in maps and other geographic publications.

Isabella is the author of two monographs on the history of copyright law: Copyright and Cartography: History, Law, and the Circulation of Geographical Knowledge (Hart Publishing, 2023), which received the 2023 LSAANZ Award for published scholarly book/monograph; and Copyright and the Public Interest in the Nineteenth Century (Hart Publishing, 2010). She is also co-editor, with Tomas Gomez-Arostegui, of Research Handbook on the History of Copyright Law (Edward Elgar, 2016), which provides an overview of the field of copyright history, as well as examining potential future developments.

She is currently the President of the Australian and New Zealand Law and History Society and a member of the Governing Board of the International Society for the History and Theory of Intellectual Property. In 2017 she was the NLSA Honorary Fellow at the State Library of NSW.

Before taking up the position at UTS in 2012, Isabella was Director of Studies in Law and Fellow in Law at Robinson College, Cambridge, and a Newton Trust Lecturer in Law at the Faculty of Law, University of Cambridge.

Prior to joining Cambridge, she practised as a solicitor at Clayton Utz in Sydney.

Her published research has included articles and chapters about copyright and cartography, geographic information, and engravings, as well as the history of design rights, copyright reform in Australia, and plagiarism.