Professors Kristen Thomasen and Vasanthi Venkatesh
Please join us in welcoming Professors Kristen Thomasen and Vasanthi Venkatesh to the Windsor Law community.
Professor Thomasen joins us as Assistant Professor with a focus on the legal, social and ethical implications of robotic technologies and artificial intelligence. She is completing her PhD from the University of Ottawa. Her thesis explores the implications of drone technology for privacy in public spaces in Canada. Her doctorate is supervised by Dr. Ian Kerr, Canada Research Chair in Ethics, Law and Technology, and received a SSHRC Joseph-Armand Bombardier Canada Graduate Scholarship. In conjunction with this scholarship, Professor Thomasen recently spent three months at the Tilburg Institute for Law and Technology in the Netherlands researching European approaches to privacy and drone regulation.
Prior to starting her PhD, Professor Thomasen clerked for the Honourable Madam Justice Rosalie Abella at the Supreme Court of Canada (2013-2014). She also clerked for the Alberta Court of Queen’s Bench (2012-2013) and articled with Alberta Justice in Calgary (2013). Professor Thomasen is a member of the Law Society of Alberta (called in 2013).
Professor Thomasen holds a JD from the University of Ottawa, an MA from the Norman Paterson School of International Relations at Carleton University, and a BA (Hons.) from McMaster University. She sits on the national Board of Directors for the Women’s Legal Mentorship Program. Learn more about her work here.
Professor Venkatesh joins us as Assistant Professor in Law, Land, and Local Economies. Her research focuses on law and social movements, citizenship and immigration, law and political economy, empirical and comparative legal methods, and critical legal approaches.
She is completing her PhD at the Jurisprudence and Social Policy Program at the University of California Berkeley, Faculty of Law. Her doctoral dissertation, “Rethinking the Temporary, Reconstituting the Citizen: Rights Mobilization by Temporary Foreign Workers” uses a comparative socio-legal approach to theorize how law is made and used by migrant workers and their advocates in several countries.
Her research is supported by the US National Science Foundation (NSF), the Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) Doctoral Fellowship, and several other grants. She has published articles in the American Journal of International Law Unbound, Brooklyn Journal of International Law, and Harvard Latino Law Review and has contributed to two chapters in a forthcoming book on marital rape and law reform. research focuses on law and social movements, citizenship and immigration, law and political economy, and critical legal approaches.
She holds law/graduate degrees from the University of Toronto, the Fletcher School at Tufts, and Purdue University.