Professor Rebecca Zahn
Law
Personal statement
My research examines labour law from European, comparative and interdisciplinary perspectives. I have particular expertise in UK and German labour law, industrial relations and labour law history. I held a Leverhulme Research Fellowship from 2022-2024 for a project entitled 鈥楻evealing the Importance of Ideas: The Intellectual History of Labour Law鈥�. The project compared the different debates taking place on worker representation on company boards in German and British intellectual circles at a critical historical juncture in the 1940s. It used these debates as a case study to trace the movement of legal ideas across national boundaries, and to explore alternative narratives which have escaped legal attention. Building on this project, I am currently researching the (legal) history of industrial democracy in the UK. I have broad experience of teaching across a wide range of undergraduate and postgraduate subjects, including EU law, labour/employment law, commercial law, delict (tort) and Scots contract law. I am a member of the editorial board of Historical Studies in Industrial Relations (Liverpool University Press), the book review editor of the Industrial Law Journal (Oxford University Press), and a member of the Research Committee of the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies (University of London). Together with Prof Elaine Fahey and Dr Fabien Terpan, I coordinate the EUFutures research network funded by UACES and the John Madison Charitable Trust (2022-2025). In 2025-2026, I will be a Senior Associate Research Fellow at the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies (University of London).
Prize And Awards
- Recipient
- 1/2023
- Recipient
- 2022
- Recipient
- 2021
- Recipient
- 2018
- Recipient
- 2015
- Recipient
- 1/6/2014
Publications
- ,
- Critical Theory and European Union Law: The Question of Postnational Emancipation (2025) (2025)
- A Transnational History of Workplace Democracy since the Second World War (2025) (2025)
- Edinburgh Law Review Vol 29, pp. 279-283 (2025)
- Schiek Dagmar,
- (2025)
- , Kullmann Miriam
- Industrial Law Journal Vol 54, pp. 1-23 (2025)
- Fahey Elaine, Terpan Fabien,
- Nordic Journal of European Law Vol 7, pp. 1-7 (2025)
Professional Activities
- Organiser
- 2024
- Speaker
- 5/9/2023
- Member
- 2023
- Examiner
- 28/11/2022
- Speaker
- 6/9/2022
- Invited speaker
- 2022
Projects
- Zahn, Rebecca (Principal Investigator)
- 01-Jan-2024 - 30-Jan-2025
- Zahn, Rebecca (Principal Investigator)
- 01-Jan-2022 - 31-Jan-2024
- Zahn, Rebecca (Principal Investigator)
- 01-Jan-2022 - 30-Jan-2025
- Zahn, Rebecca (Co-investigator) Busby, Nicole (Co-investigator) Fletcher, Maria (Co-investigator)
- 01-Jan-2019 - 31-Jan-2022
- Zahn, Rebecca (Principal Investigator)
- 01-Jan-2019 - 31-Jan-2020
- Busby, Nicole (Principal Investigator) Zahn, Rebecca (Principal Investigator)
- This joint venture between Human Rights Consortium Scotland (HRCS; a network of Scottish civil society organisations) and Scottish Universities Legal Network for Europe (SULNE) will deliver a programme of events, trainings, briefings, and information alerts tailored to the needs of civil society organisations in Scotland.
By bringing together the civil society contacts, networking, capacity building and collaborative approach of HRCS, with the legal and educational expertise of SULNE and its capacity for knowledge generation, this project will empower the Scottish third sector to engage with the process of the 鈥淓U (Withdrawal) Bill鈥� at Westminster and in Scotland and the wider Brexit discussions. The advice generated will be politically neutral and unbiased. Findings from the project will be used to inform published research output. Impact of the project and related output on participating civil society organisations and on the third sector generally will be mapped and recorded as the project progresses. - 03-Jan-2017 - 28-Jan-2019