Sophie Vigneron

Sophie Vigneron

Dr Sophie Vigneron is co-Director of Graduate Studies (taught programmes). Her research interests include art and cultural heritage law, and covers both the regulation and protection of heritage broadly defined (underwater, intangible, objects, monuments…) by national laws (French, English and the USA) and international conventions. She is also interested in the intersection between law and heritage studies. 

Joint-PhD  (co-tutelle de these, Nancy and Kent), PG cert HE, DEA in European  comparative law (Nancy), Master 1 Private law (Strasbourg), Licence  Private law (Strasbourg)

Dr  Vigneron completed her studies in Strasbourg (University Robert  Schuman), Nancy and Kent. She was awarded the first joint PhD between  the universities of Nancy and Kent for which she received the prize for  best private law thesis by the Faculty of Law of Nancyin January 2005  (ex-aequo).

Dr Vigneron's research aims firstly at  assessing the efficiency of restrictions on the circulation of cultural  objects and of restitution laws at the international, European and  national levels and secondly at defining their core relationships with  private law (property, criminal, conflict of laws) and public  international law in order to propose a coherent legal framework. Her  earlier work focused on the regulation of cultural objects and the  restitution of stolen and/or illegally exported cultural objects, in  particular in the case of historic wrong. She was the principal  investigator of the AHRC network on the protection of Cultural World  Heritage Sites.

She is currently working on a theoretical approach of cultural heritage law as an emerging field of study. Her research aims to analyse the fragmentation of cultural heritage law between the different types of heritage that are protected in order to critically explore the reasons why there are distinctive rules for the protection and regulation of movable property, immovable property, tangible heritage and intangible heritage.

Dr Vigneron has sat on review panels for the EU Research Executive Agency, the ESRC and the AHRC (she was a member of the AHRC peer review panel from 2014 to 2017); she reviewed funding application for the FWO, Research Organisation Flanders (Belgium). She also regularly comments on book proposals for CUP, Hart publishing, Elgar Publishing and has refereed articles for several leading journals: International Journal of Cultural Property, Journal of Field Archaeology, Santander Art & Culture Law Review, Social and Legal Studies.