Dr Stella Burch Elias

Stella Burch Elias is a Senior Lecturer in Law at Exeter University Law School.  She specializes in public international and comparative law, with a focus on immigration and nationality laws.  Her research focus is on the human rights of migrants and refugees, with a particular emphasis on how institutional structures and regulatory choices shape the rights, status, and inclusion of noncitizens.  Drawing on comparative and transnational perspectives, she explores how different legal systems construct and mediate immigrant inclusion and exclusion, while advancing critical perspectives on governmental accountability, the rule of law, and the protection of vulnerable populations

Outside the University, she is a Professor of Law at the University of Iowa College of Law in the USA, where she has served on the faculty since 2012. In that role she has been consistently recognized for her classroom teaching, receiving the University of Iowa’s highest teaching honor, the President and Provost’s Award for Teaching Excellence, as well as the Hubbard-Walder Award for Excellence in Teaching, the James N. Murray Faculty Award, and the Collegiate Teaching Award (Iowa Law’s “Teacher of the Year”).

She holds a BA and MA from Oxford University and a JD from Yale Law School, and she completed a two-year postdoctoral fellowship as a Climenko Fellow and Lecturer on Law at Harvard Law School.