Saskia Vermeylen

SCELG Staff Member

Saskia Vermeylen is a Chancellor’s Fellow at the Law School. Saskia has been awarded a Leverhulme Fellowship to research utopian literatures and space law. This is part of her ongoing research that combines law, continental philosophy and literary studies. Saskia has just submitted a major monograph, The Ethical Journey from Property to Generosity, wherein she has developed a new property theory using the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas in conversation with post-colonial poetry and ethnographic insights from her socio-legal work on relational being of semi hunter-gatherers in Southern Africa. She is now preparing a second monograph on art, literature and space law which she hopes to finish in 2022. The third major research strand is in the area of post-humanism and law where Saskia is developing a new post-human theory of law for the Anthropocene drawing upon eco-philosophy, anthropology and posthumanism. Saskia is also an experienced curator, and in her curatorial practice she experiments with immersive legal performances. This is linked to her latest new research project on an embodied understanding of law through dance and movement. 

Areas of expertise:

• Biodiversity and Traditional Knowledge
• Legal Theory
• Extractives
• Legal and Political Anthropology
• Space Law