Janna Wessels is a tenured Associate Professor at the Amsterdam Center for Migration and Refugee Law, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. At the Law Faculty, she serves as Director of the Bachelor's Programme 'Law in Society' (LLB) and as Research Programme Leader for Migration Law. She previously served as Secretary of the Exam Committee (2022-2025).

Prior to joining the ACMRL as Assistant Professor in 2020 (tenured since 2021), Janna Wessels was full-time Lecturer and Postdoctoral Researcher at the Chair of Public Law and European Law at Justus Liebig University Giessen, Germany. From 2012 to 2016, she worked as Research Associate for an Australian Research Council funded international comparative project on Gender-related harms in Refugee law, based at University of Technology Sydney (UTS), Australia and University of British Columbia, Canada.

Janna Wessels received her PhD in refugee law from the Faculty of Law, University of Technology Sydney and the Faculty of Law, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (joint degree). Her PhD was funded by a Quentin Bryce Law Doctoral Scholarship. In 2010 she completed a Master of Science in Forced Migration at the Refugee Studies Center at Oxford University. She also holds Master-level degrees in social sciences from the University of Münster, Germany, and in European Studies from the Institut d’Etudes Politiques (“Sciences Po”) Lille, France.

Janna Wessels' research investigates the link between human rights and migration law and policy. Her work is characterized by the use of a combination of legal doctrine, qualitative empirical investigation, and critical theory, including feminist/queer theory.

In her most recent work, Janna Wessels examines how States pursue their migration control interests not against, but with human rights law, by shaping the meaning of the law in migration-related jurisprudence. She pursues this line of research in her project ‘Countering human rights from within: Framing State interests in human rights language in migration-related jurisprudence’ (NWO, Veni project, 2022-2026), as well as in the wider framework of the research group ‘Human Rights Discourse in Migration Societies’ (Menschenrechtsdiskurse in der Migrationsgesellschaft, MeDiMi), where she is Principal Investigator for the project 'Who is Empowered by Strasbourg? Migrants and States before the European Court of Human Rights' (DFG, 2022-2026).

For her doctoral research, Janna Wessels explored the concealment controversy in refugee law doctrine. A monograph based on her dissertation was published with Cambridge University Press in 2021 (hardcover) and 2023 (paperback). Other research projects included the EU-H2020 project PROTECT – The Right to International Protection (2020-2023), exploring the legal implications of the new UN Global Compacts on Refugees and for Migration, and the Mercator Foundation funded project ‘Human Rights challenges to European Migration Policy (REMAP)’ (2018-2021), which has led to a co-authored monograph published with Hart and Nomos in 2022.

Janna Wessels serves as a member of the editorial board of the International Journal of Refugee Law and of the German Forced Migration Studies Blog (Fluchtforschungsblog), is editor of ACMRL Migration Law Series and the Feminist Theory series on the Refugee Law Initiative blog, and co-founder of the Oxford Monitor of Forced Migration (OxMo).

• Veni grant, Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO), 2022-2026

Research project: 'Countering human rights from within: Framing State interests in human rights language in migration-related jurisprudence' .

Veni is part of the Incentives Scheme. It allows outstanding researchers to conduct independent research and develop their ideas.

• Research grant, German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft DFG), 2022-2026

Research project: 'Who is Empowered by Strasbourg? Migrants and States before the European Court of Human Rights'

The project is part of the interdisciplinary research group "Human Rights Discourse in Migration Societies" (Menschenrechtsdiskurse in der Migrationsgesellschaft, MeDiMi). The aim of the ten PIs of MeDiMi is to determine the scope, forms and consequences of the expansion of human rights discourse in contemporary migration societies.

Janna Wessels holds the Senior Teaching Qualification in addition to several other teaching qualifications. She has developed a Legal Skills Learning Trajectory for the Bachelor's Programme Law in Society and designed two of the core legal courses in the Programme ('Global Migration Governance' and 'Migration Law and the Nation State').

Janna Wessels teaches in the following courses/programmes:

• Bachelor's Programme Law in Society (Migration theme and supervision of Bachelor's theses)
• Master's track International Migration and Refugee Law (Course 'Irregular Migration' and supervision of master's theses)
• Fundamental Rights in Europe (B2)
• Migration Law Clinic

• Fellow of the ‘Young Policy Network on Migration’ (YPNM) connecting academics, policy-makers and practitioners; funded by the Swiss Forum for Migration and Population Studies of the University of Neuchâtel and the German Marshall Fund
• Quentin Bryce Law Doctoral Scholarship and International Postgraduate Research Scholarship (IPRS) of University of Technology Sydney
• Fulbright Scholarship (waived)
• Hölderlin Scholarship of the Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes
• Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes
• Mobility Scholarship of the German-French University
• Toenissteiner Preis excellence award for project series: ‘Fortress Europe - Migration at Europe's External Borders’, awarded 2013 and 2015

• Justus Liebig Universitaet Giessen | Giessen | Medewerker | 2020-02-01 - present

Ancillary activities are updated daily

• Commissie Meijers | Member | 2021-06 -01 - present
• Justus Liebig Universitaet Giessen | Medewerker | 2020-02-01 - 2023-01-31