Rate My Professor Lauren Dempster

Dr Lauren Dempster is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Law at Queen's University Belfast and a Fellow of the Institute for Global Peace, Security and Justice. She is an active member of the AHSS Institute of Criminology and Criminal Justice, serves as Theme Lead for the School of Law’s Transitional Justice research cluster, and is Co-director of the QUB Human Rights Centre. Her research focuses on transitional justice, with particular interests in critical approaches to transitional justice, efforts to address the legacy of the past in Northern Ireland, enforced disappearance, the relationship between transitional justice and environmental harm, and victim mobilisation. This interdisciplinary work draws on law, criminology, anthropology, and politics. Dempster teaches modules including Crimes of the Powerful (LLM), International Criminal and Transitional Justice (UG), Transitional Justice (LLM), and Criminal Justice and Criminology Methods 1 (LLM; module convenor). She supervises PhD projects related to transitional justice, enforced disappearance, and dealing with the past in Northern Ireland.

Dempster holds an AHRC Research, Development and Engagement Fellowship for her project on forensic scientists and knowledge production in transitional justice, an interest stemming from her PhD research. Key publications include her monograph Transitional Justice and the 'Disappeared' of Northern Ireland: Silence, Memory, and the Construction of the Past (Routledge, 2019), shortlisted for the Hart-SLSA Book Prize for Early Career Academics (2020); Green Transitional Justice, co-authored with Dr Rachel Killean (Taylor & Francis, 2025), winner of the Law and Society Association of Australia and New Zealand's Book Prize (2025); and as editor, Elgar Concise Encyclopedia of Law and Peace (forthcoming 2025). She has contributed chapters such as 'Storying participation: memoir, victim engagement, and 'quiet' transitional justice' in The Cambridge Handbook of Victim Engagement in Transitional Justice (2025). Awards also include the Senator George J. Mitchell Institute Sabbatical Fellowship (2022). Dempster serves on the editorial advisory board of the Journal of Disappearance Studies, peer reviews for the International Journal of Transitional Justice, organizes the School of Law Friday Seminar Series, and delivers invited lectures on greening transitional justice. Her scholarship contributes to UN Sustainable Development Goal 16: Peace, Justice and Strong Institutions.