Greg’s expertise is in international law with research interests in its applications to counter-terrorism and to environmental protection. He teaches across these areas and Administrative Law. His research in the area of environmental protection addresses mechanisms for the effective implementation of international environmental standards. In relation to counterterrorism, Greg is currently researching the laws of armed conflict in their application to non-State actors engaged in political violence at the level of hostilities. Greg is an Associate Editor of the Yearbook of International Environmental Law and is a member of the Editorial Board (previously Editor-in-Chief) of the Review of European Community and International Environmental Law (RECIEL).
Georges Van Den Abbeele is Dean of the School of Humanities at the University of California at Irvine. He has previously served as dean at Northeastern University in Boston and at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He has also taught at Berkeley, Davis, Miami and Harvard universities. A native of Belgium, he earned a bachelor's degree from Reed College and the Ph.D. from Cornell University. He is the author of Travel as Metaphor, co-editor of Community at Loose Ends, A World of Fables and French Civilization and its Discontents. He has also published over fifty articles on travel narrative, critical theory, and Renaissance literature. He is a member of the European Academy of Sciences and recipient of the Blaise Pascal medal.
Gillian came to Royal Holloway in April 2012 as Professor of Organization Studies). Previously she has held lecturing and research positions at Birkbeck, University of London, the University of Cardiff and the University of Sheffield. She has research interests in identity at work, work-life boundaries, volunteers and voluntary work, rhetoric and rhetorical analysis, technological development and change in organizations, the technological mediation of work, sociomateriality, and the implications of smartphones and social media for working practices and organizational processes. In the recent past she has investigated the implications of smartphone use for identity, communication and information sharing (with Dr Katrina Pritchard, Birkbeck, and supported by British Academy grant SG-54143). Currently she is involved as co-investigator on a multi-institution EPSRC-funded project examining the relationship between work-life balance, use of digital technologies and identity (see the project website http://www.digitalbrainswitch.org.uk.). She also has a research interest in the working practices of academics, particularly qualitative research methods and on-line qualitative research. She has edited several qualitative research method compendia (with Prof Catherine Cassell, Leeds University Business School), the latest of which Qualitative Organizational Research: Core Methods and Current Challenges was published by Sage in April 2012 (http://www.sagepub.com/books/Book235422?siteId=sage-us&prodTypes=any&q=symon+and+cassell&fs=1 ). Catherine and Gillian are founding editors of the journal Qualitative Research in Organizations and Management: An International Journal (http://www.emeraldinsight.com/qrom.htm). Gillian is also an Associate Editor for the Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology and on the Editorial Board of the Journal of Organizational Behavior.
Professor Brock was Head of Journalism at City University London in 2009-14 and is now a part-time professor. He began his reporting career at the Yorkshire Evening Press and The Observer, joining The Times in 1981. After starting at The Times as a feature writer, he became a features editor and, in 1984, op-ed page editor. He was foreign editor, Brussels bureau chief, European Editor, Managing Editor, Saturday Editor and most recently International Editor in a 28-year career at the newspaper. He is a board member of the World Editors Forum and the International Press Institute (IPI) and chair of the British committee of the IPI. He broadcasts and lectures frequently and reviews for the Times Literary Supplement. His latest book is Out of Print: Newspapers, Journalism and the Business of News in the Digital Age.
Geoff Gilbert is a Professor of Law in the School of Law and Human Rights Centre at the University of Essex. He was Head of Department between 2000-2003 and 2011-13. In 2012, he was appointed a Professorial Visiting Fellow at the University of New South Wales in Sydney. He has been Editor-in-Chief of the International Journal of Refugee Law since 2002. He is author of ‘Current Issues in the Application of the Exclusion Clauses’ in Feller, Türk and Nicholson, Refugee Protection in International Law (2003), part of UNHCR’s Global Consultations on the 50th Anniversary of the 1951 Convention. He was founding Director of Studies for UNHCR’s annual Thematic Refugees and Human Rights course for judges, government officials and UNHCR staff at the International Institute for Humanitarian Law, Sanremo, Italy, from 2005 to 2007. In 2014 he was appointed a consultant to UNHCR (with Anna Magdalena Rüsch) on Rule of Law: Engagement for Solutions and is part of the Solutions Alliance Thematic Group on Rule of Law. He was Specialist Adviser to the Joint Parliamentary Committee on Human Rights in its inquiry into the treatment of asylum-seekers, 2006-07. He was part of the Human Rights Centre's research programme on human rights in situations of acute crisis that was carried out on behalf of DfID and then directed Essex's residential training programme of human rights for DfID staff, 2006-07. He drafted a report in 2010 for the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe on a possible Protocol to the ECHR dealing with minority rights. He has carried out human rights training on behalf of the Council of Europe and UNHCR in the Russian Federation (Siberia, the Urals and Kalmykskaya), Georgia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia, Macedonia and Kosovo. He has advised governments on their laws in Central and Eastern Europe, the Balkans and the FSU, and was the Director of the OSCE training programme on combating torture for judges in Serbia and Montenegro. His areas of interest are international criminal law, the protection of refugees and other displaced persons in international law, the protection of minorities in international law, international humanitarian law and international human rights law. In 2009 he was elected a Bencher of the Middle Temple and was called in February 2010.
I have published research on the European Parliament, the British House of Commons, the constitutional and budgetary politics of the EU and on Euroscepticism in the Journal of European Public Policy, Comparative Political Studies, the Journal of Common Market Studies, Party Politics and in the Journal of Public Policy. In 2012, Palgrave-Macmillan published my co-edited volume on the Reform of the European Union Budget. I am currently conducting research on the conintuity of consensus in the European Parliament following the Enlargement of the EU to ten new member states in 2004 and on the reform of the EU budget. From 2009 to 2012, I was programme director of the interdisciplinary BA in European Studies and I teach courses at BA and MSc level in EU politics and policy, comparative democracy and democratization, and comparative institutional politics. In the past I have taught courses on government and public policy of France, comparative European politics, and at an introductory level on democracy in Europe. I also supervise two research students, one on the subject of the European Parliament committee system, and the other on EU anti-corruption policy. Research interests: My main areas of research are budgetary decision-making in the EU and comparative legislative politics (with a particular focus on the European Parliament). I also have research interests in comparative electoral and party politics and in constitutional reform. I am a member of Royal Holloway’s Centre for European Politics as well as the following external research networks: European Parliament Research Group, European Legislative Politics Research Group and of the European Parties, Elections and Referendums Network. My PhD thesis (London School of Economics) of 2005 on Institutionalised Consensus in the European Parliament is now available for download here for free subject to academic or not-for-profit use as well as due citation as follows - Benedetto, Giacomo (2005) Institutionalised consensus in Europe’s parliament. PhD thesis, The London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), University of London. It is accessible at: http://etheses.lse.ac.uk/848/
