GLOCUL People

Director

Advisory Board

Dr Roger Ballard, Consultant Anthropologist
Professor Ralph Grillo, Emeritus, Anthropology, Sussex University
Professor Werner Menski, Law, SOAS, University of London
Dr Jakob de Roover, Research Centre Vergelijkende Cultuurwetenschap, University of Ghent
Dr Atul Shah, Diverse Ethics, a social enterprise

Affiliated Queen Mary staff

Professor Valsamis Mitsilegas, Head of the Department of Law
Dr Yossef Rapoport, Senior Lecturer, School of History
Professor Eric Heinze, School of Law
Dr Lasse Thomassen, School of Politics and International Relations

Visiting academics, staff and interns

Chiara Correndo

Chiara will be a visiting research student at GLOCUL during April-May 2016. She holds a five-year Master’s degree in Law at the University of Turin, where her dissertation analysed legal and sociological aspects of dowry and dowry deaths in India and received the "Worthy of publication" honour. In 2014, she was research fellow at the Centre for Comparative and Transnational Law (CDCT), where she carried out extensive research on the protection of women’s rights in India. Her main fields of study are postcolonial feminism, gender issues in India, legal pluralism, anthropology of law and informal justice. She is currently a PhD student in Comparative Private Law at the University of Turin, where she is conducting a comparative research on the rationalisation of legal pluralism and non-state justice in India and Africa. Chiara is a former CTLS (Center for Transnational Legal Studies in London) student and is actively involved in international and humanitarian issues. She has been a member of the Italian Red Cross since 2004, on behalf of which she managed several international projects (Bosnia and Croatia) as a Regional Deputy for International Cooperation. She holds a Diploma in Emergencies and Humanitarian Intervention from the Institute of International Political Studies (ISPI).

Derya Bayir

Dr Derya Bayır

Derya is author of the book Minorities and Nationalism in Turkish Law. Her interests include international human rights and minority rights, law and religion, the Turkish legal system, and Ottoman pluralism. She obtained her doctorate from the Law Department at Queen Mary, and her thesis was awarded a prize by the Contemporary Turkish Studies Chair at the LSE. Derya has litigated many cases before the European Court of Human Rights, including the prominent case of Güveç v. Turkey and is also a legal consultant with Avci & Yazici Law Firm in İstanbul. From August 2014 she is affiliated to GLOCUL as a visiting scholar while holding a Leverhulme Research Fellowship to research secular law and religious diversity in Turkey.

Dr Waheeda Amien

A native of South Africa, Dr Amien is a Senior Lecturer in the Faculty of Law, University of Cape Town. She has written extensively on religious freedom and the challenges of legal pluralism in the field of Family Law. As a visiting scholar at GLOCUL between September and November 2013 she continued working on her book on the relationship between Muslim family law and secular legal frameworks. She also convenes and teaches courses on, among others, Muslim Personal Law and Human Rights, and Legal Pluralism, Religion, Culture and Human Rights. Waheeda is actively involved in many areas of legal reform and policy in South Africa and internationally. She has provided expert advice, particularly in the area of Muslim Personal Law to local and international law practices, the City of Cape Town and the Commission on Gender Equality in South Africa. In 2013 she was invited to an Experts’ Group Meeting at the United Nations in Geneva to provide input to the United Nations Independent Expert on Minority Issues on South Africa’s position relating to the rights and securities of religious minorities. She is active in several South African and international human rights organisations including the Commission on Legal Pluralism. To view a selected list of her publications see her profile page on the University of Cape Town web site.

Alberto Horst Neidhardt

Alberto worked on the RELIGARE project as a post-graduate Research Assistant from April-October 2012. Alberto holds a First-Class Honours BA in the Languages, Culture and Institutions of Eurasia by Cà Foscari, University of Venice. His BA dissertation analysed the international and domestic responses to child marriage in South Asia. In December 2011, he completed an MA in International Comparative Legal Studies at SOAS, University of London writing his dissertation on recent legal developments tackling 'forced marriage' in English law. While at SOAS, he taught the course on the 'Legal Systems of Asia and Africa' and worked at the Centre for Ethnic Minority Studies. Upon leaving GLOCUL in 2012, he won a PhD scholarship at the European University Institute. He is researching the relationship between models of private international law, the pluralisation of family forms, and the protection of diversity and equality in the European context.

Preet Kaur Virdi

Preet is broadly interested in the socio-legal status of non-Western women in Western liberal democracies. In 2012 she was a postgraduate research assistant for the RELIGARE project at Queen Mary and a doctoral research student at SOAS, University of London. Preet left GLOCUL at the end of her appointment and continues to research access to family justice for Sikhs in Ontario, Canada, analysing divorce cases to uncover the gendered importance of Sikh religious and Punjabi cultural traditions and izzat, a South Asian normative order that governs honour, status, reputation and respect.

Tommaso Amico di Meane

Tommaso Amico di Meane is a PhD student in Comparative Public Law at Seconda Università of Naples, with research interests in comparative legal systems, Indian law and European legal systems. He is now comparatively researching two legal "fractals" - the Indian Union and the European Union - starting from the most immediate common concern, which is the need to democratically manage a wide range of diversity. Tommaso holds an MA in International Relations from Cattolica University in Milan and a Masters in Diplomacy from the Italian Institute of International Political Studies (ISPI). He was awarded an Internship at the Italian General Consulate of Italy in New York (United Nations Affairs) in April-July 2007, worked for the Italian Government (Ministry of Social and Family Affairs) in 2007 and for the Italian Parliament (EU Legal Department) from 2008 to 2012. He was Lecturer at LUISS University in Rome from 2011, Visiting Researcher at the Indian Law Institute (ILI) in Delhi during April-May 2014, and is a Visiting Research Student at GLOCUL during October-April 2014.

Esin Calişkan

Esin holds a BA in Cultural Studies from Sabanci University, Istanbul and an MA in Migration and Law from Queen Mary University of London. She is currently working on her doctorate at Queen Mary, examining the legal activity of the Alevi community in London and Istanbul comparatively. Her MA dissertation analysing court cases of Alevis in Turkey on the issues of compulsory religious education, recognition of places of worship, place of religion in birth certificates and cultural establishments, was awarded as the prize for the best Politics dissertation at Queen Mary. For more than five years before joining GLOCUL, Esin worked as a refugee status determination associate at UNHCR in Turkey. Her broader research interests include critical anthropology of law, critical religious studies, post-colonial studies and refugee law.

Dara Salam

Dara Salam holds an MA and MPhil in Philosophy from Birkbeck, University of London and a PhD in Political Theory from LUISS University, Rome. During his doctoral research he was a visiting PhD researcher at King’s College London. He is a fellow member of the International Research Network on Religion and Democracy. His interests include Political Theory, Human Rights, Religion and Secularism, and Middle East politics. He will be affiliated to GLOCUL during the first half of 2016 when he will be working on the question of public reason and legal pluralism. Dara has published in Political Studies Review and Public Reason.