Research Institute for Social Sciences

Stella was awarded her LLB from University College London in 1995. Her final year dissertation, Sex and Violence?, focused on sadomasochism and the criminal law in the wake of R v Brown, and challenged the law’s double standards with regard to consent to harm.

Since then she has had a varied career, including over ten years’ local government experience in project development within education services. Stella took advantage of voluntary redundancy to return to studying law, and obtained her LLM in Law and Society from Keele University in 2012.

Stella’s research dissertation, The Queer, the Cross and the Closet, examined contemporary conflicts between religion and sexuality in equality law, asking whether it is justified to restrict the manifestation of religious belief, where such manifestation collides with LGBT rights. She argued against extending religious exemptions, or any “reasonable accommodation” of religious expression, to the current legal provisions: if the religious have placed themselves in a discriminatory position, the presumption should remain against their benefiting from equality law at the expense of LGBT people.

Stella maintains a keen interest in the relationship between law and human rights; in how law constructs and responds to alternative identities; and in how queer legal theory might continue to develop. She is also interested in how developments in the field of neuroscience can inform the debates around faith, sexuality, identity and morality.

Stella enjoys what she calls her “mission” to engage students in Public Law, as a means of understanding the relationship between the state and the citizen-subject. She has also been a guest lecturer at the University of Ljubljana in Slovenia, teaching students of British Society & Culture about the English legal system.

Stella’s PhD research (tentatively entitled God and My Right) builds on the themes introduced in her LLM dissertation. Her thesis seeks to inform the legal understanding of – and hence the approach to – the relationship between sexual orientation and religion. It also aims to produce a new understanding of identity to inform the current debate over these competing rights.

The thesis will involve an enquiry into the lived experience of lesbian, gay and bisexual (LGB) people, including those who also practice one of the main creedal religions. Qualitative research will explore how religious LGB people experience their own attachments to their sexuality and to their faith, and how they experience these respective rights under equality law. The research aims to inform both societal understanding and future implementation of equality law.

Stella’s PhD research is being supervised by Alex Sharpe and Tony Bradney.