Dr Elena Brodeala

Dr Elena Brodeala is Lecturer in Law at Kent Law School. Previously, she was Adjunct Lecturer at Sciences Po, France, where for over three years she taught courses on human rights, gender studies, bioethics, and international law. She was also a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Zurich, Switzerland, where she received the 2021 Best Researcher Award from the University Research Priority Program ‘Human Reproduction Reloaded’. In 2020-2021, Dr Brodeala was an Odobleja Fellow at the New Europe College in Bucharest, Romania. She holds a PhD in Law from the European University Institute (EUI) in Florence, Italy, and an LL.M. from Yale Law School. She is also an alumna of Yale University’s Sherwin B. Nuland Summer Institute in Bioethics.

Dr Brodeala was a visiting researcher at the Kent Centre for Law, Gender and Sexuality, UK (2018), New Europe College, Romania (2016), and Central European University, Hungary (2015). She was one of the founding members and coordinators of the Constitutionalism and Politics Interdisciplinary Working Group at the EUI (2016-2017).

Together with Dr Silvia Suteu from University College London, Dr Brodeala is co-editing a volume on feminist judgements in Central and Eastern Europe. Her previous work has appeared in the European Constitutional Law Review and other international journals as well as in edited volumes published with Cambridge University Press and Oxford University Press. Between 2017-2018, she was an editor of the Yale Journal of Law & Feminism. She served as peer reviewer for various academic journals, including the International Journal of Constitutional Law, the Journal of Gender-Based Violence, and Bioethics. 

Gender and Law; Bioethics; Reproductive Justice; European Human Rights Law; Comparative Constitutional Law; Eastern European Law and Society; Socio-Legal Studies

Dr Brodeala is teaching or co-teaching the following modules:

Postgraduate

LAWS9431 – Global Health Law, Governance and Ethics

LAWS9420 – Reproductive Justice

LAWS9194 – Legal Research and Writing

Undergraduate

LAWS6540 – Race, Sexuality and Gender Justice 

Dr Brodeala is interested in supervising research in the following areas:

• Bioethics and the Law, with a particular interest in questions related to reproductive medicine
• Gender and the Law, particularly focusing on questions of constitutionalism, Eastern Europe, women in the judiciary or on women’s human rights
• Human Rights Law, particularly within the Council of Europe framework

Dr Brodeala is keen on supervising doctoral researchers and students from underrepresented groups in academia. Apart from English, her working languages are French and Romanian. She also has knowledge of Italian, German and Spanish, should prospective supervisees wish to work with sources in these languages.

Between 2018-2020, Dr Brodeala was awarded a Robina Fellowship from Yale Law School to work at the European Court of Human Rights and at the Council of Europe’s Information Society Department in Strasbourg, France. She was also a coordinator of the Council of Europe’s project “Freedom of Expression and Freedom of the Media in South-East Europe (JUFREX 2)”. Between 2012-2013, she worked (through the European Voluntary Service) for Eurodesk Sweden on matters of youth empowerment and non-formal education. Between 2011-2012, she volunteered for a Romanian NGO in the field of preventing and combating violence against women, where she was involved in two European projects.