Professor Lorna Fox O’Mahony has been appointed as Executive Dean for the Faculty of Humanities at the University of Essex and will take up her new role this summer.

• Previous announcement for new Executive Dean for Faculty of Social Sciences and Faculty of Science and Health

Professor Fox O’Mahony is currently Professor of Law at Durham Law School. Her teaching experience is in land law and in trusts and equity and her research focuses on socio-legal analyses of property problems. Her work is focused on advancing policy-oriented, socio-legal and critical theoretical understandings of a wide range of property issues, particularly relating to housing and home. As well as publishing widely in these areas, she has interned at the United States District Court in Los Angeles; been a visiting scholar at Cornell Law School, the Centre for Socio-Legal Studies at the University of Oxford, Stellenbosch University in South Africa and the University of Western Australia; been a consultant to the Office of Law Reform; and presented expert evidence on housing rights for inner-city tenants in Belfast and Dublin.

She said: “I am excited to be joining Essex as Executive Dean for Humanities, as the University celebrates its 50th anniversary and embarks on an ambitious new strategic plan to shape the next stage of its development.  Essex has a well-deserved reputation for excellence in education and research that contributes to society, and I am delighted to take up this opportunity to work with colleagues to contribute to the future success of the University.”

Professor Fox O’Mahony brings a wealth of academic leadership and management experience from positions at Durham, at Queen’s University Belfast, and through other roles including Chair of the Board of Directors of the Association of Law, Property and Society; representative of the Joint Academic Standards Board of the Law Society for England and Wales and the Bar Standards Board; Institutional Reviewer for the Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education (QAA); and as a member of the Law sub-panel for the Research Excellence Framework (REF) 2014.

Vice-Chancellor Professor Anthony Forster said: “Lorna will make an outstanding contribution to the senior leadership team and we look forward to welcoming her in July.”