Professor Eddie Bruce-Jones

Professor Eddie Bruce-Jones joined SOAS in 2023. Prior to SOAS, he spent 13 years as an academic at Birkbeck, University of London, where he most recently served as Executive Dean of the School of Law.  

Prior to that, he practiced law at the city law firm Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton, LLP in London, where in addition to corporate practice, he handled several asylum and public international law pro bono matters. Bruce-Jones is Associate Academic Fellow of the Honourable Society of the Inner Temple and member of the New York Bar.  

In 2020, he was the William and Patricia Kleh Visiting Professor of International Law at Boston University School of Law; he has also held visiting posts at the Central European University, King's College London, Humboldt University of Berlin and the Max Planck Institute for Legal History and Legal Theory in Frankfurt. He received a PhD and an MA in Social Anthropology from Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, an LLM in Public International Law from King’s College London, a JD from Columbia Law School, and an undergraduate degree in Anthropology and Afro-American Studies with Spanish and German from Harvard University.

Bruce-Jones is author of Race in the Shadow of Law: State Violence in Contemporary Europe (Routledge, 2016) and has published in the areas of racial equality, migration law, and law and the humanities. He is currently Principal Investigator on an AHRC-funded research grant titled 'Towards an Integrated Colonial Archive: Humanities, Law and British Indentureship.' He is currently writing a monograph on the British indentureship of South Asians in the Caribbean that combines law-and-humanities approaches, archival research and legal analysis.  In 2018, he received a Wellcome Trust grant to support a symposium and the 2021 publication of a special issue of the journal Race & Class on Race, Health and State Violence.

Bruce-Jones is a member of the editorial board of the Journal of Immigration, Asylum and Nationality Law (Bloomsbury) and advisory boards of the European Law Open, the Journal for the Study of Indentureship and its Legacies, and the Peter Lang 'Imagining Black Europe' Book Series.  He serves on the Boards of Directors of the Institute for Race Relations and Rainbow Migration, and the Advisory Board of the Centre for Intersectional Justice (Berlin). He is a comparative law specialist for the Independent Commission on the Death of Oury Jalloh (on police brutality and due process) in Germany.

He serves on the Academic Council of the German National Discrimination and Racism Monitor (NaDiRa), at the German Centre for Integration and Migration Studies (DeZIM).  He has served on expert consultation panels for the United Nations OHCHR and the Equality Committee of the Council of Euorpe's Parliamentary Assembly. He has taught general education and writing courses in prisons in Boston and New York.

Human Rights Law, British Colonial Indentureship, Law & Humanities, Comparative Equality Law, Citizenship & Migration, Critical Theory