Menu Close
Professor of Law, University of Bristol

Professor Devyani Prabhat is a Professor in Law at the University of Bristol Law School, UK, with legal practice experience in Constitutional law. She holds a LL.M and a PhD from New York University and is an Attorney at Law, New York. She researches and teaches Migration, Citizenship and Nationality from a socio-legal and comparative perspective.

She is an ESRC research grant holder on British Citizenship and the Practice of Nationality laws (2014-2017). Project website: http://www.bristol.ac.uk/law/research/centres-themes/citizenshipandlaw.html. The project focused on the processes of gaining, holding and losing of citizenship and the role of nationality law practice for long term residents or British citizens. She supervises doctoral students researching on citizenship, migration, children's rights, human rights, the legal profession, and sociolegal theory and methods.

Professor Prabhat's book Unleashing the Force of Law: Legal Mobilization, National Security, Basic Freedoms ( Palgrave Macmillan Socio-legal Studies Series) has won the Birks Prize for Outstanding Legal Scholarship (Society of Legal Scholars ) 2017.

The book was shortlisted by both the Society of Legal Scholars (2017) and the Socio-Legal Studies Association (2016) for book prize awards.

Her book on British Citizenship with Policy Press (2018) titled Britishness, Belonging and Citizenship is available open access at

: http://www.oapen.org/search?identifier=647390

Professor Prabhat works closely with practioners and civil society actors in a number of countries. for e.g. she has edited a book on British Citizenship (Elgar: 2019) which is based on academic-practitioner collaborations in the field of immigration law.

She was an Associate Directorof Border Criminologies, Oxford Law Faculty, and serves on the Executive Committee of the UK Socio-Legal Studies Association.

Experience

  • 2012–present
    Reader in Law, University of Bristol Law School