Diamond Ashiagbor joined the University of Birmingham in May 2025, as Professor of Law and 125th Anniversary Chair. Her previous academic positions include: Professor of Law at the University of Kent; Professor of Law and Director of Research at the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies, University of London; Professor of Labour Law at SOAS University of London; Reader in Law and Lecturer in Law at University College London; and Lecturer in Law at the University of Hull.

Diamond studied law at the University of Oxford, before qualifying as a solicitor in 1993, with trade union firm Robin Thompson & Partners (now Thompsons). In 2002, she completed a PhD at the European University Institute in Florence in European Union employment law and the law and economics of labour market regulation. She undertook postdoctoral research in EU law as a Research Fellow in the Institute of European and Comparative Law, University of Oxford and as a Fellow of Worcester College, Oxford.

Professor Ashiagbor has established a substantial international academic profile and made a significant contribution to a body of knowledge in labour/employment law including labour migration; equality, ‘race’ and colonialism; European Union law; law and regionalism, in relation to the EU and African Union; law, trade and development; and economic sociology of law. In 2006, she was awarded the Society of Legal Scholars/Peter Birks Prize for Outstanding Legal Scholarship for her book on European Union employment law and the economics of labour market regulation.

Diamond has held a number of visiting positions including having been a Visiting Scholar at Columbia Law School, New York; Senior Fellow at Melbourne Law School; Genest Global Lecturer at Osgoode Hall Law School, Toronto; and Visiting Researcher at the United Nations University Institute on Comparative Regional Integration Studies (UNU-CRIS), Bruges. She is currently a member of the Visiting Faculty in the Harvard Law School’s Institute for Global Law and Policy.

Diamond is one of the managing editors of European Law Open, and has previously served on the editorial boards of Feminist Legal Studies, and London Review of International Law.

She is a Trustee of Black Cultural Archives, the UK’s only national heritage centre dedicated to collecting, preserving and celebrating the histories of African and Caribbean people in Britain. Since September 2024, Diamond has been a Fixed Term Member (i.e. academic associate) at Matrix Chambers, one of the UK’s leading barristers’ chambers, with an outstanding reputation for its work on international law and human rights. In 2018, she was elected an Honorary Bencher of the Middle Temple, one of the four Inns of Court in England and Wales, which exists to support barristers and promote the rule of law globally.

Professor Ashiagbor’s research is united by an interest in bridging social science-influenced legal scholarship around labour and migration, the European Union and regionalism, equality, governance and economic law, with historical and humanities-inflected legal scholarship around race and colonialism. 

She has long worked within the socio-legal tradition, beginning with her doctorate (European University Institute, 2002) and prize-winning monograph (Oxford University Press, 2005) which drew together law, governance, and the economics of labour market regulation in the European Union. Her publications made an early contribution to debates around ‘new forms of governance’ within the EU, and are now at the forefront of examining the contribution of ‘economic sociology of law’ for the understanding of national, European and transnational labour law regimes. 

Recent research explores European integration, in particular in the creation of the single market and the social dimension of that market, through the lens of European colonialism. Diamond’s current research project, for which she was awarded a British Academy/Leverhulme Trust Senior Research Fellowship in 2023, is on Reconceptualising Labour Law: Race, Legal Form and the Legacies of Colonialism. This research is influenced by ongoing collaborations with Professor Kerry Rittich, University of Toronto. Diamond’s 2021 article ‘Race and Colonialism in the Construction of Labour Markets and Precarity’, has become one of the most highly read articles published in the Industrial Law Journal, the leading English-language labour law journal globally.

Professor Ashiagbor’s academic work has received funding from a number of sources: she has been the recipient of the US-EU Fulbright Research Scholarship; a Fernand Braudel Senior Fellowship; a Leverhulme Trust Research Fellowship; and a British Academy Senior Research Fellowship. In October 2020, she was made Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences (FAcSS), for her contribution to social science.