Dr Rob Wilks

• Qualifications:BA (Hons), PGDipL, PGDipLP, LLM, PGCDPPHE, FHEA, PhD
• Position:Senior Lecturer in Law
• Department:Bristol Law School
• Telephone:+441173281588
• Email:Rob.Wilks@uwe.ac.uk
• Social media:

About me

Originally from Newport, South Wales, I am deaf and fluent in British Sign Language (BSL) and English, and I teach through BSL.  At UWE Bristol, I lecture in employment law across undergraduate and postgraduate programmes.

I was previously Senior Lecturer and Legal Practice Course Leader at the University of South Wales, and Lecturer in Professional Law at Cardiff University.

After completing an LLM with Distinction in Law of Employment Relations in 2007, I was awarded a doctorate by the University of Leicester in 2020 for my thesis examining whether equality law works for deaf people and whether sign language recognition can achieve transformative equality.

My monograph, The Deaf Legal Dilemma: Challenging Equality Law, will be published by Hart in 2026.  I am also editor of the forthcoming volume Developing Deaf Legal Theory and am working to establish Deaf Legal Studies as a field.

I am Principal Investigator for the £25,000 Strengthening Global Majority Representation in Deaf Legal Theory: A Pilot Project in Ghana project funded by the UWE Vice Chancellor's Early Career Researchers scheme, and Co-Investigator with Dr Christopher Shank (Bangor University) and others on the £1.04 million AHRC Deaf Health Wales project.

Area of expertise

I have a strong interest in equality and anti-discrimination law as it relates to deaf people, as well as in sign language law.  My current focus is on developing Deaf Legal Theory as a new perspective in legal jurisprudence and working to establish Deaf Legal Studies as a field.

Alongside this, I am engaged in deaf education research. With Rachel O’Neill (University of Edinburgh), I have co-authored reports and articles on the impact of the BSL (Scotland) Act 2015 on deaf education, and comparative insights from Welsh- and Gaelic-medium education.  Our recent work includes a study on ethical dilemmas faced by Teachers of Deaf Children and Young People (Deafness and Education International, 2025) and an article on adopting BSL in deaf education (Languages, Society and Policy, 2025).  We also have an article forthcoming in the Language Learning Journal on integrating BSL into deaf education.

Publications

Publications loading...