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.
