Staff profile

Fiona comes to academia via a research career as an investigative journalist and with the UN. She spent more than a decade living and working in Southeast and South Asia. Her work has a particular focus on the rights and experiences of people affected by armed conflict and displacement - especially women and girls. She was awarded an LLM with distinction in Gender, Conflict and Human Rights from the University of Ulster in 2022. Her Masters’ dissertation received the Northern Ireland Human Rights Commission Dissertation Prize and led to her being made a Non-Residential Fellow at the Centre for Asia Pacific Refugee Studies, University of Auckland, to convert her research into a policy paper. 

Current Research

She is the recipient of a Durham Doctoral Scholarship award for her PhD research which considers UN Sustainable Development Goal 16: just, peaceful and inclusive societies. Her work focuses on how to uphold the rights to protection from and justice for conflict and displacement related sexual violence under international law and in community-led responses. Her research takes a multi-disciplinary approach and she is supervised by Prof Catherine O’Rourke, Prof Roger McGinty and Prof Nayanika Mookherjee.