Professor Diamond Ashiagbor

Qualifications: BA, MA (Oxon); PhD (European University Institute); Solicitor (England and Wales, non-practising); Postgraduate Diploma in Learning & Teaching in Higher Education (Oxon).

Diamond Ashiagbor joined Kent Law School in October 2018, having previously been Professor of Law and Director of Research at the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies, School of Advanced Study, University of London. She has also been Professor of Labour Law at SOAS University of London; Reader in Law and Lecturer in Law at University College London; Research Fellow in the Institute of European and Comparative Law, University of Oxford and Fellow of Worcester College, Oxford; Lecturer in Law at the University of Hull. 

She has been a Visiting Scholar at Columbia Law School, New York; Senior Fellow at Melbourne Law School; Genest Global Lecturer, Osgoode Hall Law School; and Visiting Researcher at the United Nations University Institute on Comparative Regional Integration Studies (UNU-CRIS), Bruges.

Diamond is the author of the monograph The European Employment Strategy: Labour Market Regulation and New Governance, which won the Peter Birks/Society of Legal Scholars Prize for Outstanding Legal Scholarship 2006. Her current projects include a monograph on ‘Social rights and the market: Embedding trade liberalisation in regional labour law’, interrogating the social dimension of regional economic integration: how markets may be embedded within, constituted by, and ameliorated through the ‘social’, in particular by labour law and social policy, with a focus on integration within sub-Saharan Africa.

This research is influenced by ongoing collaborations with Amanda Perry-Kessaris, Prabha Kotiswaran, Ruth Dukes and others to develop an ‘economic sociology of law’, including events and publications such as Towards an Economic Sociology of Law (Wiley-Blackwell 2013), with financial support from the Journal of Law and Society.

Diamond has long worked within the socio-legal tradition and has coordinated a project which explores labour law’s conceptual and normative narrative in light of the continued dominance of informal work in the global South, and increased informalisation in the global North. The related symposium and forthcoming book (Hart, 2019) Re-imagining labour law for development: informal work in the global North and South, was the Society of Legal Scholars Annual Seminar for 2016. In addition, she is also keen to find ways to bring together law and the humanities, and co-founded a speaker series on Telling stories about law and development, including scholars from political theory, philosophy and sociology. She has also been a visitor to, and is working with scholars in, the Institute for International Law and the Humanities (IILaH), Melbourne Law School.

Research funding

• Society of Legal Scholars, 2016 SLS Annual Seminar, (£10,000)
  
• Leverhulme Trust Research Fellowship, 2013-14 (£35,535)
  
• Fernand Braudel Senior Fellowship, European University Institute, Florence, 2011
  
• British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship 2002-5
  
• Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) Postdoctoral Fellowship 2002-3
  
• US-EU Fulbright Program, EU Fulbright Research Scholarship, 2000 ($8,800)

Diamond teaches undergraduates in the fields of Labour Law and Public Law    

Professor Ashiagbor welcomes proposals for postgraduate research in the areas of labour and equality law; EU law and regional integration; law and development; and research adopting socio-legal approaches to law.

• Fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences 
• Member of the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) Advisory Board, 2019-22
• Advisory Panel of the ERC-funded project ‘Work on Demand: Contracting for Work in a Changing Economy’ (PI: Ruth Dukes, University of Glasgow)
  
• Member of the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) Grant Assessment Panel, 2014-18
  
• Member of the Editorial Board, Feminist Legal Studies, 2014- 
  
• Member of the Executive Committee, Socio-Legal Studies Association, 2014- 
  
• Member of the Steering Committee, Labour Law Research Network, 2015- 
  
• Member of the Society of Legal Scholars.