Jessica Elias

Jessica Elias is a PhD Candidate (KLS Next Generation Scholar) and Assistant Lecturer.  

She was trained at the International Criminal Court and the Special Tribunal for Lebanon in The Hague. Bringing together insights from political theory, she continued to research and lecture on Public International Law at the Amsterdam University College and the Free University of Amsterdam (VU) in 2017-2019.

She also assisted in managing humanitarian and developmental programs in the Middle East. Having lived for 23 years in Lebanon, she worked with Oxfam Great Britain in its regional headquarters, the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights in the wake of the Arab Spring (2012), and the (Lebanese) Red Cross as a volunteer paramedic in Beirut. She is also occasionally consulting for the United Nations’ Climate Parliament, for the Middle East and North African region.

Jessica was a member and Chief of the Scouts Association in Lebanon for 11 years and is fluent in Classical Arabic (along with 15 national dialects of Arabic from the Middle East region), English, French, and Dutch.

Prior education:

Jessica completed her Double Master of Laws in International Law with International Relations (with Merit) at the University of Kent in 2015 as a Chevening Scholar selected from Lebanon. She had received her Bachelor of Political Studies at the American University of Beirut in 2012 (GPA: 87/100) and continued to complete the theoretical part of her Bachelor of Laws at The Lebanese University. Previously in 2011, she participated in two tailored exchange programs at Sciences Po Paris (Menton campus) and Georgetown University (Crete campus).

She was awarded with several academic excellence and leadership scholarships including: The Fund for American Studies for the Summer School at Georgetown University (2011), the Philippe Jabre Foundation Scholarship (2012), the Chevening Scholarship from the United Kingdom (2014-2015), the Prize for Feminist Scholarship (1st runner-up) at the University of Kent (2015), the European Council Award for internships (2015), the European Union Institute small grant (2019), and the 2019 European Union Institute, Scholarship for Invited Scholars to Workshop. She is the recipient of the Alumni Scholarship of the Kent Law School (2024- present).  

Jessica is particularly interested in research on protests and peace processes to understand legal spaces beyond State-level actors. She relies in her analysis on critical legal scholarship and cultural theory for answering the trans-disciplinary questions. To address her scientific objectives, Jessica has conducted interviews and focused group discussions on actors of informal justice from Syria and Lebanon.

Tort Law

At the Kent Law School, Jessica teaches the Tort Law module and the Critical Legal Theory module. 

Previously at Leiden University (The Netherlands), Jessica was Lecturer of International Studies at The Faculty of Humanities. She has been teaching for 5 years in the areas of Politics and Cultural Studies but also the specialised courses on Culture of the Middle East and Politic of the Middle East. Additionally, she has taught Cultural Interaction for second year Undergraduates. Jessica was also Visiting Lecturer for the Master programme of Middle Eastern Studies at University of Groningen (2023). Having completed the Higher Education Teaching and Curriculum Design qualification (BKO) in 2019, she is very passionate about understanding how students are guided in their learning journey as they form key concepts in a dialectical process of meaning construction.

Supervised by Dr. Iain MacKenzie and Dr. Shahd Hammouri.

Center for Critical International Law (Kent Law School)
Center for Critical Thought (Kent Law School)
The Critical Legal Conference (KLS and UK)
The Socio-Legal Association Studies (UK)
The Institute for Global Law & Policy (Harvard University).