Sophie Starrenburg has been a PhD candidate at the Grotius Centre for International Legal Studies since September 2018, prior to which she was a teaching/research staff member at the Centre. She was awarded the NWO Research Talent grant to conduct her research, entitled ‘The Foundations of Cultural Heritage Protection: Striking a Balance between the Local and the Global’.

More information about Sophie Starrenburg

Sophie obtained her BA at Leiden University College in The Hague, majoring in Global Justice. She graduated summa cum laude in 2014, and her bachelor thesis on the topic of cultural genocide was selected to be presented at Leiden University’s Dies Natalis in 2015.  

After her bachelor’s degree, Sophie continued on to the LL.M programme in public international law at Leiden University, where she was a member of the Telders Moot Court team.  

After graduating cum laude from her degree at Leiden, she went on to pursue a second LL.M at the University of Cambridge as a Rotary Scholar. She graduated with First Class honours and was awarded the De Hart Prize in Law from Christ’s College. During her time at Cambridge she was also an editor for the Cambridge International Law Journal.

Sophie worked as a research and teaching assistant at the Grotius Centre for International Legal Studies from 2016 to 2018. In 2018, she was awarded the NWO Research Talent grant to conduct her PhD research, entitled ‘The Foundations of Cultural Heritage Protection: Striking a Balance between the Local and the Global’. A summary of her research project can be found here.

She has a particular interest in the intersection between cultural heritage and public international law, and worked for several years within the Advisory Committee on the Assessment of Restitution Applications for Items of Cultural Value and the Second World War in The Hague. 

Title research: The foundations of cultural heritage protection in public international law. Striking a balance between local and global interests through human rights.