Meet Our Instructor

Dr Heather Allansdottir is a distinguished academic with expertise spanning both history and law. She achieved a 1st/Distinction in History from Keble College, Oxford University, and earned one of the top 5 marks in the UK for her History A-level in 2003. Her History undergraduate thesis was supervised by the then-Regius Professor of History at Oxford.

She completed her doctorate in comparative constitutional law at the University of Oxford's Centre for Socio-Legal Studies, with her thesis on the post-Mubarak Egyptian constitutions. She currently serves as Visiting Fellow at the Lauterpacht Centre for International Law at the University of Cambridge and lectures at Birkbeck University in London, where she is Deputy Director of LLB and LLM programmes.

Her debut novel 'Psalm 119' (2008), published when she was 23, was awarded the prestigious Helene du Coudray Prize. She has held academic posts in Tel Aviv, Moscow, and Iceland, where she worked on the Icelandic constitution at Bifröst University. Her writing has appeared in The Guardian, Al Jazeera, New Statesman, Times Literary Supplement, and The Globe and Mail.

Her book on space law, 'New Perspectives in Outer Space Law', co-authored with Naman Anand, was published by Springer in 2025. She specialises in the legal frameworks governing orbital rights, resource extraction, international treaties, and space sustainability, and is founder of the space consultancy Astrodottir.