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Professor Joanne Conaghan elected as Fellow to The British Academy

Press release issued: 26 July 2021

The Law School’s Professor Joanne Conaghan has been elected to The British Academy as Fellow in recognition of her outstanding contributions to social sciences.

Joanne Conaghan, Professor of Law, together with Robert Mayhew, Professor of Historical Geography and Intellectual History, and Dorothy Price, Professor of History of Art, are three University of Bristol academics to have been elected to The British Academy. They are among 84 newly elected Fellows announced on Friday 23 July.

Professor Conaghan, Head of the Law School from 2015-2018, has a passion for legal education and an enduring research interest in issues of law and gender. Over the course of her career, she has written variously in the fields of labour law, tort, human rights, sexual violence, and legal philosophy.

She said: “I have always admired the work of the British Academy, particularly their support of early career researchers and look forward to getting involved with this work in due course.

“I am really lucky to work in a strong and supportive academic community which has always supported the highest academic standards while embracing scholarly diversity.”

Founded in 1902, the British Academy is the UK’s national academy for the humanities and social sciences.

It is a Fellowship of over 1,400 of the leading minds in these subjects from the UK and overseas. Current Fellows include the classicist Professor Dame Mary Beard, the historian Professor Sir Simon Schama and philosopher Professor Baroness Onora O’Neill, while previous Fellows include Dame Frances Yates, Sir Winston Churchill, Seamus Heaney and Beatrice Webb.

The Academy is also a funding body for research, nationally and internationally, and a forum for debate and engagement.

Welcoming the Fellows, the new President of the British Academy, Professor Julia Black FBA, said:

“As the new President of the British Academy, it gives me great pleasure to welcome this new cohort of Fellows, who are as impressive as ever and remind us of the rich and diverse scholarship and research undertaken within the SHAPE disciplines – the social sciences, humanities and the arts. I am very much looking forward to working with them on our shared interests.

“The need for SHAPE subjects has never been greater. As Britain recovers from the pandemic and seeks to build back better, the insights from our diverse disciplines will be vital to ensure the health, wellbeing and prosperity of the UK and will continue to provide the cultural and societal enrichment that has sustained us over the last eighteen months. Our new Fellows embody the value of their subjects and I congratulate them warmly for their achievement.”

Further information

Professor Joanne Conaghan is Professor of Law at the University of Bristol Law School. A graduate and postgraduate of St Hugh’s College Oxford, and previous Head of the Law School at the University of Bristol and at the University of Kent, Joanne has written extensively about issues relating to gender and law and is widely recognized as a leading scholar in that field, both nationally and internationally.

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