Find a PhD supervisor

Once you've identified the subject area you wish to research, you will need to find a supervisor for your project. All Doctoral Researchers are provided with a lead supervisor, who will act as the main source of academic supervisory support and research mentoring during your time as a Doctoral Researcher at the University.

Start your search

麻豆精选 for supervisors below to see who you think may be a great fit for your research area. Once you have identified they are able to offer appropriate supervisory support, you can start to reach out to staff using the contact details provided on their profile. 

麻豆精选 results for “legal theory”

Professor Chris Thornhill

Professor of Law

Birmingham Law School

Chris has supervised PhDs on many legal topics, including: Constitutional Reform in Kenya; Constitutional Reform in Egypt; the Jurisprudence of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights in National Constitutional Law in South America; the Global Right to Food; the History of International Criminal Law; Military Law and Legal Reform in China; Constitutional Law and Populism in Poland and Brazil; Constitutional Reform in Scotland; Constitutional Reform in Turkey; Constitutional Reform in ...

Dr Lydia Morgan

Dr Lydia Morgan

Associate Professor
Deputy Head of Education (PGT)

Birmingham Law School

Dr Morgan is keen to supervise postgraduate research students whose research interests lie in the following areas:
The regulation of: the security services, investigatory powers, access to public information
Legal theory, particularly those interested in critical consideration of theories of justice, contemporary liberal theory and democratic theory
Applied legal theory
Counter-terrorism, security, human rights and accountability
The interplay of any of the above with ideas of liberty, privacy, and human ...




Professor Rosie Harding

Professor Rosie Harding

Professor of Law and Society
Deputy Dean

Birmingham Law School

Professor Harding is happy to supervise postgraduate research students in any of the following areas:

- Mental Capacity and Disability Law, especially research involving questions of everyday decision-making, dementia, intellectual disability, powers of attorney, advance directives and end of life decision making.
- Older persons rights, especially research focused on older person鈥檚 attitudes to human rights, and the arguments for and against a new international convention on the rights of ...


Professor M谩ir茅ad Enright

Professor M谩ir茅ad Enright

Professor of Feminist Legal Studies
Head of Research Impact

Birmingham Law School

I am willing to supervise research students in the following areas:

Gender, law and Religion, particularly from feminist or critical legal perspectives.
Politics of reproductive justice.
'Historical' institutional abuse.
Law, activism and social movements.
I am happy to answer email queries from prospective students before submission of an official proposal.





Professor Mohammad (Shahab) Shahabuddin

Professor Mohammad (Shahab) Shahabuddin

Professor of International Law & Human Rights

Birmingham Law School

Shahab is happy to supervise postgraduate research students in the areas of International Law and International Human Rights Law. He has specific interest in supervising PhD students in the field of international legal history, international legal theory, third world approaches to international law, ethnic minority rights and ethnic conflicts, and right to self-determination.

Professor Alexander Orakhelashvili

Professor Alexander Orakhelashvili

Professor of International Law

Birmingham Law School

Professor Orakhelashvili has supervised or is currently supervising doctoral students undertaking research in the following areas:
鈥 Aut dedere aut judicare as a customary rule
鈥 The UN member states and individuals sharing international responsibility for the serious violation of international law committed during peace support operations
鈥 Iran and Nuclear non-proliferation
鈥 John Austin鈥檚 theory of law
鈥 Implications of New Technology for Targeting under International Humanitarian Law






Dr Alex Latham-Gambi

Dr Alex Latham-Gambi

Assistant Professor

Birmingham Law School

Alex is happy to supervise PhD students in any of his areas of research expertise, including:
鈥 Constitutional theory
鈥 Legal/political philosophy
鈥 Public law
鈥 Human rights law
鈥 Housing law

Potential students are invited to get in touch via e-mail to discuss their preliminary research proposals.

Current PhD students:

Yossra Hamouda, Denshway, Reparations and Decolonizing International Law
Yuan Feng, Comparative Study of Constitutional Review

Past PhD students:

Sylvester ...















Dr Ali-Reza Bhojani

Dr Ali-Reza Bhojani

Assistant Professor in Islamic Ethics

Department of Theology and Religion

I welcome proposals across Islamic Studies, especially in Islamic law and ethics, that engage the textual resources of the Islamic intellectual traditions.

Current doctoral supervision

The phenomena of Maddhab change amongst Sunni legal schools in the Mamluk period
Spiritual striving in British Muslim Shia communities
Previous doctoral supervision
The Origins of Im膩m墨 岣d墨th: A Bio-bibliographical Cross-reference Analysis
Taqi al-Din al-Subki on ijtihad and the role of the Qur鈥檃n in his ...







Professor Karen McAuliffe

Professor Karen McAuliffe

Professor in Law and Language
Birmingham Fellow

Birmingham Law School

Professor McAuliffe is currently committed to work 100% of her time on the European Research Council project 鈥楲aw and Language at the European Court of Justice鈥, but welcomes research proposals for future doctoral and postdoctoral research in the following areas:

The relationship between language and law
Multilingual legal systems
Legal translation/Institutional translation and its impact on law
Dynamics of language/culture/multilingualism in European Union Institutions
Proposals for empirical research projects and ...





Dr Shaimaa Abdelkarim

Dr Shaimaa Abdelkarim

Assistant Professor in Law (Postcolonial Legal Theory and Critical Race Studies)

Birmingham Law School

Shaimaa welcomes doctoral supervision in these areas:
鈥 Third World Approaches to International Law
鈥 Law and Development (specifically through a postcolonial lens)
鈥 Critical Approaches to Human Rights
鈥 Alternatives to Human Rights Practices
鈥 Law, Gender and Sexuality (especially in black feminist thought)
鈥 Law and Abolitionist Praxis







Dr Gavin Byrne

Dr Gavin Byrne

Associate Professor

Birmingham Law School

Dr Bryne is interested in supervising doctoral research on:

Jurisprudence
The application of other disciplines of study to the study of Law (philosophy, literary theory, economics etc)
Aspects of property and intellectual property law



Professor Atina Krajewska

Professor Atina Krajewska

Professor of Law and Birmingham Fellow
Head of Research

Birmingham Law School

Reproductive Rights
Global, International, and Transnational Health Law
Human Rights and Health
Medical and Health Law
Comparative Law



Professor Andrzej Pacek

Emeritus Professor in Multiphase Systems

School of Chemical Engineering

  • Simultaneous characterisation of morphology and rheology of complex multiphase products
  • Effect of catalyst particles on bubble size and overall reaction rate in mixed solvents in heterogeneous reactors at elevated pressure and temperature
  • Concurrent Product Process design using rotor stator devices
  • Solid/gas/liquid interfaces in multiphase catalitical reactors
  • Lignosulphonate as a source of fine chemicals

Dr Jimmy Packham

Dr Jimmy Packham

Associate Professor in North American Literature

Department of English Literature

I would be delighted to supervise postgraduate work and research projects, and invite expressions of interest, in any of the following areas:

- Nineteenth-century American literature 鈥 especially Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, Emily Dickinson, Ambrose Bierce, Charles Chesnutt, Harriet Prescott Spofford, Sarah Orne Jewett, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, James Fenimore Cooper, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Richard Henry Dana Jr.

- The Gothic 鈥 I have research specialisms in American Gothic, maritime ...



Professor Ruth Page

Professor Ruth Page

Professor of Applied Linguistics
Program Director, BA Digital Media and Communications

Department of Linguistics and Communication

I am always looking for students with exciting projects and am particularly interested in supervising projects which incorporate discourse analysis and narrative analysis, focus on data from spoken or social media contexts, which include multimodal materials along with verbal data, and/or explore topics in language and gender. I have supervised PhD projects in the broad fields of

Discourse analysis
Critical discourse analysis
Computer-mediated communication



Professor Will Palin

Professor Will Palin

Professor in Biomedical Materials Science
Director of Research

School of Dentistry

Dr Palin's current research themes for doctoral supervision include:

Materials chemistry (investigating polymerisation efficiencies of photoactive biomaterials and mproving photoinitiator systems for dental and novel medical applications
Mechanical properties of biomaterials (mechanical response and fatigue of resin composites, characteristics of bulk resin-ceramic hybrid materials, and reliability statistics for brittle materials)
Materials science-biological interface (effects of anti-bacterial additives on polymerisation kinetics and cellular behaviour and wavelength/irradiance effects on photoinitiator efficiency and ...



Dr Claire Palles

Dr Claire Palles

Associate Professor

Department of Cancer and Genomic Sciences

Claire supervises a PhD student, a clinical academic fellow and several medical students.  She would be interested in hearing from people with either a scientific or clinical background that would be keen to join the group.

Dr Isobel Palmer

Lecturer in Russian

Department of Modern Languages

鈥 Russian and Russophone poetry (19th-21st Century)
鈥 Russian Formalism and literary theory
鈥 Comparative modernisms, world literature, post-colonialism
鈥 (Modernist) performance culture
鈥 Intersections between literature and visual art/music



Dr Gu Pang

Dr Gu Pang

Associate Professor in Procurement and Operations Management

Department of Management

Gu welcomes PhD applicants who are interested in: machine learning, blockchain technology, remanufacturing, reverse logistics, closed-loop supply chains, food value chains, optimisation. 

For informal discussion, please forward your email to g.pang.1@bham.ac.uk

Dr Julian P盲nke

Dr Julian P盲nke

Associate Professor in European Politics
Head of Education, School of Government

Department of Political Science and International Studies

  • European Union foreign policies
  • Central & Eastern European foreign policies (Germany, Poland, Slovakia)
  • European Neighbourhood Policy

Dr Anna Papoutsi

Dr Anna Papoutsi

Leverhulme Early Career Fellow

Department of Social Policy, Sociology and Criminology

  • Yunchong Bao

Mr Tommaso Pardi

PhD Student

School of Metallurgy and Materials

  • Rustam Stolkin
  • Amir Ghalamzan

Dr Dhruv Parekh

Dr Dhruv Parekh

Associate Professor in Critical Care and Respiratory Medicine
Director of NIHR/Wellcome Birmingham Clinical Research Facility
Acute Care Research Theme Lead

Department of Inflammation and Ageing

Dhruv is interested in supervising doctoral research students who are interested in research in the field of respiratory, peri-operative medicine and critical care.

If you are interesting in studying any of these subject areas please contact Dr Dhruv Parekh directly, or for any general doctoral research enquiries, please email mds-gradschool@contacts.bham.ac.uk.

For a full list of available Doctoral Research opportunities, please visit our Doctoral Research programme listings.

Professor Jo Parish

Professor Jo Parish

Professor of Tumour Virology

Department of Cancer and Genomic Sciences

Professor Jo Parish has supervised more than 20 postgraduate students in areas of virology and cancer biology. Many of these students now hold posts at prestigious national and international research institutes.

Jo is interested in supervising doctoral research students in the following areas:

  • Regulation of HPV gene expression control
  • Regulation of HPV replication and persistence
  • Regulation of HBV gene expression control

If you are interested in studying any of these ...