Cambridge PhD candidate Ardi Imseis will join Queen’s Law this summer after a 12-year career in senior legal and policy roles with the United Nations and a number of years practising law in Canada, including serving as Senior Legal Counsel to the Chief Justice of Alberta. 

“I am delighted to announce the appointment of Ardi Imseis,” says Dean Bill Flanagan. “In addition to his extensive legal and policy experience, he brings to Queen’s an outstanding record of teaching, research and scholarly publication.”

With law degrees from Columbia (LLM) and Dalhousie (LLB), Imseis is in the final stages of completing his doctorate at Cambridge in Politics and International Studies, conducting SSHRC-funded research on the intersections between international law, geopolitics and power in the work of the UN. As a case study, he is applying critical legal and post-colonial theories to the UN’s handling of the question of Palestine.

Imseis’s research, teaching, and practice expertise includes international humanitarian law, human rights law, refugee law, criminal law and international legal history. His work has appeared in such leading journals as the American Journal of International Law, the Berkeley Journal of International Law, the Harvard International Law Journal, the Oxford Journal of Legal Studies, and the University of British Columbia Law Review. The impact of his research is evident, too, in invited addresses to the UN Security Council, the U.K. House of Lords, and France’s Sénat. 

He has been a Harlan Fiske Stone Scholar and a Human Rights Fellow at Columbia Law School, as well as a Visiting Research Scholar in Law at the American University of Cairo. 

As a teacher and lecturer in Canada and abroad, Imseis has covered a wide variety of international law topics. This spring he is teaching International Protection of Human Rights and Refugees as part of the Queen’s Law International Law Program at Queen’s Bader International Study Centre (“the Castle”) in East Sussex, U.K.

By Lisa Graham