Three British Academy Global Professorships to join Oxford

23 July 2020

Professor Francis Dodoo, Professor Martin Scheinin and Professor Lena Salaymeh are to join the University of Oxford’s Social Science Division as three new British Academy Global Professors.

The British Academy annually funds 10 Global Professorships in the UK. According to the Academy, ‘Each four-year appointment is intended to be a complete project in itself and is expected to involve a specific research focus...
‘The aim of the programme is to enable world-class internationally-recognised established scholars to further their individual research goals, while strengthening the UK research base and advancing the research goals and strategies of their UK host institutions.’

Commenting on the appointments, Professor Dame Sarah Whatmore, Head of Oxford's Social Sciences, says, 'The Social Sciences Division warmly welcomes to Oxford three of the 10 Global Professorships awarded by the British Academy this year, A further demonstration of our ongoing commitment to the power of international research collaboration, I look forward to the wealth of insights which Professors Francis Dodoo, Lena Salaymeh and Martin Scheinin will bring to the intellectual life of our departments.'

Professor Dodoo is to join the Leverhulme Centre for Demographic Science in the Department of Sociology. Professor Scheinin is joining the Bonavero Institute of Human Rights, in the Faculty of Law, and Professor Salaymeh will be welcomed by the Oxford School of Global and Area Studies.

Professor Dodoo’s current focus is on how bride-wealth payment affects the normative reproductive autonomy of married women in Africa. He will explore how levels of bride-wealth payment impact women’s ability to control their reproductive goals, how that ability translates preferences into behaviour and how this, in turn, is conditioned by lineage, ethnicity, urban environment and education.

Professor Martin Scheinin is the author of numerous books and articles on international and European human rights law. His research project is: 'Addressing the Digital Realm through the Grammar of Human Rights Law. He will conduct research in a key area for the Bonavero Institute: the human rights law implications of the digital world.

Professor Salaymeh specialises in Islamic law, Jewish law and contemporary issues of law and religion. She will be researching two projects: the contemporary genre of revolutionary Islamic jurisprudence and resistance through the lens of de-colonial theory.

Notes for Editors

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  1. Professor Dodoo has been Liberal Arts Research Professor of Sociology and Demography at Pennsylvania State University, Pro Vice-Chancellor for Research, Innovation and Development at the University of Ghana and founding director of the African Population and Health Research Center (APHRC) in Kenya. 
  2. Professor Scheinin comes to Oxford from the European University Institute, where he has been Professor of International Law and Human Rights, since 2008
  3. Professor Salaymeh was a Visiting Associate Research Scholar at Princeton’s Davis Center for Historical Studies, a visiting professor at the École Pratique des Hautes Études, and a Robbins Fellow at the UC Berkeley School of Law.
  4. The British Academy’s Global Professorship programme is funded by the UK’s Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, through the National Productivity Investment Fund

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