Academic visitors
Information for those interested in spending a period of research at the UCL Labour Rights Institute
We do welcome academic visitors under two schemes at UCL Laws, one for Visiting Academics (for a maximum period of 3 months) and one for (fee-paying) Affiliate Academics (for longer than 3 months but no longer than one calendar year).
As to the application process, you would first need to identify a staff member at UCL Laws who works in your research area and is willing to act as your 'Academic Host' (which involves a series of duties). Such an 'Academic Host' would need to submit a completed Academic Visitor Application Form to the UCL Laws Vice Dean International, being responsible for approving such visits, along with a copy of your CV and research proposal (explaining the research project and why conducting it at Laws would be helpful). In cases where the Visiting Academic is not personally known to the host , references from the Visiting Academic's home institution will also be required.
Space at UCL Laws is limited and may not always be available. A hot desk area is available in Bentham House for use by visitors, but space is allocated on a hot-desk (not individual) basis.
Below you can find a list of colleagues that, in recent years, we have been privileged to host at UCL LRI as Academic Visitors.
Professor Silvana Sciarra
Silvana Sciarra, Professor of Labour Law and European Social Law at the University of Florence Law School was a Visiting Professor at UCL Laws in February 2014. During her stay she was continuing her research on a chapter on Social policy to appear shortly in a Companion to EU law. She also took care of an updated and slightly modified translation into English of her book L’Europa e il lavoro. Solidarietà e conflitto in tempo di crisi, published in 2013 by Laterza and accepted by CUP.
The LRI coordinators acted as academic hosts and provided stimulating opportunities to meet colleagues and doctoral students. Professor Sciarra offered a seminar to UCL and KCL students on a recent CJEU’s ruling dealing with information and consultation and the lack of horizontal effect of Article 27 of the EU Charter. She also delivered a public lecture at LSE for the LLLdg on ‘Transnational social dialogue in the EU: legal basis and legal enforceability of transnational company agreements’.
Prof. Sciarra is a member of the LRI’s Board of Advisors and has contributed to a recent book edited by Nicola Countouris and Mark Freedland ‘Resocialising Europe in a time of crisis’ (CUP 2013).
Professor Dr Kurt Paerli
Prof. Dr. Kurt Paerli is a Professor for Labour and Social Law and for EU-Law at School of Management and Law in Winterthur and at the University of Sankt Gallen (Switzerland). He has been visiting the Institute for Labour Rights between November and December 2013 carrying on research on the influence of the European Convention on Human Rights to Labour Law.
This work is part of his research project about the Europeanization of Swiss Labour Law. In this study effects of EU-Labour Law to a non-EU Member state will be analysed as well as the role of international Human Rights instruments with special focus on the European Convention on Human Rights.
Dr Einat Albin
Project details
As part of her broad project that aims to provide more profound understandings of service work and the way labour law should address services, in this particular study Einat is looking at two examples that are very much relevant to services: sexual harassment of workers by customers and dress codes.
Both are examples of a broader phenomenon that she calls the commodification of the body, behaviours and presentations of the body.
By drawing on management studies, literature on consumer culture theory, on commodification, and on the social location of those performing service work, Einat develops a theory of service work, the role of customers in today's work domain and the limitations of the current legal approach.
This is done in an intention to propose a legal framework that can better address these phenomenon of service work.
Dr Sergio Canalda
Sergio Canalda is a lecturer at the Pompeu Fabra University (Barcelona) and a member of the Spanish research group in Labour and Social Security Law (greDTiSS).
He has been visiting UCL Laws between April and June 2013 carrying on research on the notion of employer and the consequences of the new inter-firm relationships on employment relations.
The core argument of his work is that the fragmentation of productive organization also provokes a parallel fragmentation of labour rights. New organizational phenomena such as franchise networks or virtual enterprises create a multilateral employment relationships which typically escape from health and safety regulation or from the mechanisms of workplace representation.
Dr Valerio Destefano
Dr De Stefano is a researcher with a grant from Università Commerciale “L. Bocconi”, Milan, and he will be a visiting academic at UCL from February through May 2012.
Dr De Stefano will carry on research on temporary forms of employment and on the employment contract as a flexibility tool for firms.
In a previous publication (http://www.ilo.org/labadmin/what/pubs/WCMS_116294/lang--en/index.htm), Dr De Stefano argued that recourse to temporary forms of employment in Italy may be motivated also by the fact that temporary workers might be induced to implicitly waive some of their statutory or contractual rights, by not exercising them, in order not to displease the employer/principal and to try to obtain an extension or renewal of their contract.
Professor Giovanni Orlandini
Giovanni Orlandini is a Professor at the Faculty of Law of the University of Siena (Italy), and a Visiting Professor at UCL Laws between August and September 2012.
The object of his research while in London is the posting of workers within the framework of the provisions of services and the use of social clauses within public contracts to contrast social dumping practices.
Dr Jeremias Prassl
Dr Jeremias Prassl is a Visiting Lecturer at UCL Laws for 2013-14, where he teaches on the LLB Employment Law Course. His principal research interests are in the fields of Employment Law, Company Law, European Union Law, and Civil Aviation. In Employment Law, Jeremias is particularly interested in the application of regulatory norms in fragmenting labour markets.
Recent work includes an in-depth analysis of the notion of the employer in multilateral organisational settings (from agency employment to Private Equity portfolio companies) and critiques of the newly introduced notion of employee shareholders. Jeremias also serves on the steering committee of INLACRIS, a European Commission-funded network monitoring changes in Social and Labour Law in response to the financial crisis.
His work on the EU Passenger Rights Regulation 261/2004 specialises on the purported exclusivity of the Montreal Convention in regulating air carriers’ contractual liability, and has led to consulting and executive education work in the Civil Aviation industry.
Jeremias read law at Oxford, Paris and Harvard. He is a Fellow of St John's College, Oxford and has held visiting positions in Paris, Beijing, Columbia Law School, New York and the Max Planck Institute, Hamburg.
Professor Katherine Stone
Professor Katherine Stone is the Arjay and Frances Fearing Miller Professor of Law at UCLA. She is also Visiting Professor at UCL in November 2012 and is on the advisory board of the UCL Labour Rights Institute.
Professor Stone is a leading expert in labor and employment law in the United States. She was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship Award in 2008 and a Russell Sage Fellowship for 2008-2009 for her work on the changing nature of employment and the regulatory implications.
Professor Stone's recent book, From Widgets to Digits: Employment Regulation for the Changing Workplace (Cambridge University Press in 2004) won the 2005 Michael Harrington Award from the American Political Science Association for the "outstanding book that best links scholarship to struggles for justice in the real world."
The book was also the finalist (second place) for the C. Wright Mills Award from the Society for the Study of Social Problems. Her forthcoming book, Globalization and Flexibilization: The Remaking of the Employment Relationship in the 21st Century, will examine the changing employment landscape in Japan, Australia, and Europe.
Contact the Institute
By email:
laws.research@ucl.ac.uk
By post:
UCL Institute for Labour Rights (LRI)
UCL Faculty of Laws
Bentham House, 4-8 Endsleigh Gardens
London WC1H 0EG