Staff focus
Ben Farrand
Professor Ben Farrand
Ben is Professor of Law & Emerging Technologies at Newcastle Law School. Focused on interdisciplinary understandings of the interrelations between law and politics in the regulation of technology, Ben is currently a Co-Investigator on the EPSRC-funded project ‘AGENCY: Assuring Citizen Agency in a World with Complex Online Harms’, and Principal Investigator on the ESRC DiscribeHub+ funded project ‘Digital Sovereignty by Design’.
Ben Farrand joined Newcastle Law School in 2019, following on from positions as Lecturer in Intellectual Property Law & Policy at the University of Strathclyde from 2012-2015 and Associate Professor of Law at Warwick University from 2015-2019. Completing his PhD in 2011 at the European University Institute on Digital Copyright Law, Ben’s research has expanded from issues of intellectual property enforcement online to a broader interdisciplinary research agenda concerning the interrelations of law and politics in the regulation of technology. This incorporates thinking about the role of geopolitics in determining the regulatory frameworks for technologies in areas of political sensitivity, the emergence of the EU as a cybersecurity actor, and the politics of governance in the field of social media regulation.
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Given these interests, Ben completed an MSc in Political Research Methods at the University of Strathclyde’s School of Government and Public Policy in 2015. He publishes in a range of legal, policy, and international relations journals, such as European Law Open, European Security, Journal of Common Market Studies, Journal of European Integration, and Policy Studies. He currently serves as an editor of the Contemporary European Studies book series affiliated with UACES, the University Association for Contemporary European Studies.
For perhaps obvious reasons, Ben’s teaching centres around topics of technology regulation, including on modules such as Law & Emerging Technologies, which considers how we think about regulation in the context of new technologies or new uses of technology; Social Media Regulation, which brings insights from sociology, governance studies and international relations to study how different regimes regulate content and behaviour on online platforms; and Global Intellectual Property Law, which focuses on the interrelations between trade, economic policy, and the global IP system. Given his interests, Ben also provides guest lectures in other Schools, such as a session on the Future of AI Governance for Computer Science, and Food Allergens and the Law for Nutrition and Dietetics. He will also be introducing new cybersecurity-related modules in the next year.
Ben is currently a Co-Investigator responsible for the Law, Regulation and Governance theme of the £3.5 million EPSRC Agency project, which focuses on how we can holistically approach and mitigate the harms experienced online by vulnerable users, and Principal Investigator on the £150,000 ESRC Digital Sovereignty by Design project, which examines the role of geopolitics in framing the regulatory approach to semiconductor and microprocessor research, design, and manufacture. He is the Law and Governance thematic lead at the Newcastle University Centre of Research Excellence in Cybersecurity and Resilience, and a member of the National Cyber Security Centre-accredited Academic Centre of Excellence in Cyber Security Research.
