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Graduate Study and Research Scholar Opportunities
To enable advanced students from other parts of the world to participate in its unparalleled range of course and seminar offerings, the Program in Refugee and Asylum Law supports the admission to the University of Michigan Law School of a select number of candidates to undertake master’s and doctoral studies in refugee law.
Experienced academics may apply to spend a term or a full academic year at the University of Michigan Law School as a Research Scholar, with entitlement to benefit from the Law School’s extraordinary library collection and to audit courses and seminars associated with the Program in Refugee and Asylum Law.
The presence of both advanced degree candidates and visiting research scholars with a commitment to refugee and asylum law has created a vibrant intellectual community of refugee law scholars at the University of Michigan.
Ms. Simone Alt is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Konstanz, Germany under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Kay Hailbronner. She is writing her Ph.D. thesis on the development of the refugee definition in International and European Law as well as on the impact of this development on German Asylum Law.
From November 2006 until June 2010, Ms. Alt served as a researcher at the Center for International and European Law on Immigration and Asylum at the University of Konstanz, Germany. Additionally, she led undergraduate seminars in German Constitutional Law. As a co-author with Prof. Dr. Hailbronner she was responsible for the elaboration of two national reports on the transposition of the EC-directive on the qualification for refugee and subsidiary protection status (the so called Qualification Directive, directive 2004/83/EC) and the EC-directive on victims of trafficking in human beings (directive 2004/81/EC) as well as of a synthesis report on the EC-directive on mutual recognition of expulsion decisions (directive 2001/40/EC) within the framework of a project of the Odysseus Network for Migration Law Experts conducted for the European Commission. She is a co-author of a comment on articles 1-10 of the Qualification Directive (directive 2004/83/EC) in the forthcoming Commentary ‘EU Immigration and Asylum Law’ edited by Prof. Dr. Hailbronner.
She has gained practical experience with refugee law issues during her legal clerkship at the Regional Representation of UNHCR for Austria, the Czech Republic and Germany in Berlin as well as during her time volunteering as a refugee counsel for Amnesty International in Stuttgart (Germany) and a church organization in Radolfzell (Germany).
Ms. Alt has studied law at the Universities of Passau (Germany) and Geneva (Switzerland). During her yearlong studies at the University of Geneva, she focused on the law of international organizations, human rights law, humanitarian law and international criminal law and obtained the ‘Certificate in transnational law’. She graduated in 2004 from the University of Passau (Germany) with the First State Exam in law and obtained the Second State Exam in law from the Higher Civil Law Court of Stuttgart (Germany) in 2006.
During her time at the University of Michigan Law School, she will examine the interpretation of the refugee definition in International and European Law. |