Roxana Vatanparast is a Visiting Fellow with the Program on Science, Technology and Society (STS) at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government and a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Turin, Department of Law.  She is also an Affiliate of the Center on Global Legal Transformation at Columbia Law School and a member of the Coordinating Committee of the European Society of International Law Interest Group on International Law and Technology.  Her work is broadly concerned with the co-production of technology and technocratic projects of global governance.  While with the STS Program, she will do research on the marketplace of ideas and the role of digital platforms in governing online speech.

In her doctoral research, she analyzes the development and proliferation of undersea cables in the late nineteenth and the twentieth century and how they both shaped and reflected ideas about the world and how to best govern it.  An interdisciplinary scholar, her research interests include technology and global governance, data, infrastructures, digital platforms, history of technology, STS, and political economy.

Additionally, Roxana is an international legal consultant with experience in both the private and non-profit sectors.  She has spent research stays at Sciences Po Law School and the Institute for Global Law & Policy at Harvard Law School.  She serves on the Advisory Board of the International Bateson Institute and previously served as Co-President of the Board of Directors of the Iranian American Bar Association’s Northern California Chapter.  She holds a LL.M. from the International University College of Turin and a J.D. from the University of California, Hastings College of the Law.

SELECT PUBLICATIONS

Data Governance and the Elasticity of Sovereignty, 46 Brooklyn Journal of International Law __ (forthcoming).

Data Waste, Harvard International Law Journal Online (2020) (with Elettra Bietti), available at: https://harvardilj.org/2020/04/data-waste/.

The Infrastructures of the Global Data Economy: Undersea Cables and International Law, Harvard International Law Journal Online (2020), available at: https://harvardilj.org/2020/04/the-infrastructures-of-the-global-data-economy-undersea-cables-and-international-law/.

Designed to Serve Mankind?  The Politics of the General Data Protection Regulation, Völkerrechtsblog (May 2019), doi: 10.17176/20190529-121845-0, available at: https://voelkerrechtsblog.org/designed-to-serve-mankind/.

Book Review (reviewing Fritjof Capra and Ugo Mattei, The Ecology of Law: Toward a Legal System in Tune with Nature and Community (2015)), 8(2) Journal of Human Rights & The Environment 305-310 (September 2017).