Leeds University’s Professor Iyiola Solanke has been appointed as Oxford’s new Jacques Delors Professor of European Law, and will begin lecturing in the autumn.
Professor Solanke’s wealth of expertise in European law combined with her focus on anti-discrimination and racial integration law will greatly enhance our academic community. Her work focuses on anti-discrimination legislation, social movements and the judiciary and governance in Europe through historical, empirical and socio-legal approaches. She is the author of an EU law textbook and two monographs, Making Anti-Racial Discrimination Law (2011) and Discrimination as Stigma – A Theory of Anti-Discrimination Law (2017). Professor Solanke also convenes an international forum which investigates black experiences of the police across Europe and in 2017 founded the Black Female Professors Forum to empower and create greater solidarity for black women in academia.
She is also Visiting Professor at Wake Forest University Law School and has held Fellowships at the University of Michigan, Pompeu Fabra Universidad, the University of Sydney, McGill, and Cambridge. In 2017, she was elected an Academic Bencher of Inner Temple and appointed a member of the statutory Valuation Tribunal for England.
“On behalf of the Somerville community, I am delighted to welcome Professor Solanke,” said Jan Royall, College Principal.
“Somerville is a college with a proud history of working against discrimination. I look forward to working with her to ensure that we are living up to the ethos on which we were founded: to include the excluded, nurture potential, and foster excellence.
The Somerville law tutors (Professor Julie Dickson, Professor Christopher Hare, and Dr Achas Burin) added: “We are really looking forward to welcoming Professor Solanke to Somerville in the new academic year. Her range of interests and expertise will enrich the College’s law community enormously.”
