Sara Dehm teaches and researches in the areas of public international law, legal history, international migration and refugee law, and the law of international organisations. Her research addresses questions of international authority, border control, knowledge production and migrant resistance in the context of European empires, settler colonialism and struggles for decolonisation. Her first book, Administering Migration: International Law and the Global Ordering of People, explores how international law and international organisations have regulated human mobility over the course of the 20th century, and is under contract with Cambridge University Press. 

She is a Chief Investigator on a collaborative ARC-funded project investigating the journeys, contributions and legacies of European emigre jurists, including Jewish refugee jurists, to Australian law, the legal profession and academia, together with Professors Katherine Biber and Ana Vrdoljak. Her journal article on the admission to Australian legal practice struggles of two Jewish refugee lawyers in the mid-20th century ('Legal Exclusions', published in Federal Law Review in 2021) won the Law and Society Association of Australia and New Zealand/Aotearoa ECR article publication prize in 2022.

Sara's expertise in international refugee law centres on issues of state responsibility, externalisation and refugee claim-making. She is involved in a range of collaborations detailing how the provision or denial of healthcare to refugees in Australia’s extraterritorial detention regime constitute new forms of border control and state responsibility externalisation towards refugees and asylum seekers, including a focus on the gendered harms of immigration detention. Her expertise is cited in media articles examining the gendered harms and privatisation of Australia's immigration prisons, the legal limbo of temporary refugee protection, the denial of refugee students' right to education and the impacts of COVID-19 on refugees, migrants and undocumented people in Australia. 

Sara joined UTS Law in January 2017. She holds a BA/LLB (Hons) and PhD in International Law from the University of Melbourne. Prior to joining UTS Law, Sara was a Senior Fellow at the Melbourne Law School, where she taught in the Melbourne Law Masters program. She was also a Junior Faculty member of the Institute for Global Law and Policy, Harvard Law School's Doha Workshop in 2015. She has been a Visiting Fellow at UNSW Faculty of Law (2014), and an Associate at the Australian Human Rights Centre, UNSW (2015-2018). Sara is currently an External Affilitate and Visiting Scholar at (B)OrderS: Centre for the Legal Study of Borders, Migration and Displacement at the Queen Mary School of Law, University of London; an Associate Member of the Institute for International Law and the Humanities, Melbourne Law School; and a member of the Emerging Scholars Network of the Kaldor Centre for International Refugee Law, UNSW. She is also a co-convener of the advocacy network Academics for Refugees.