Dr Ellie Whittingdale

Ellie is a Fellow in Law and joined LSE Law School in 2025. Prior to this, Ellie was a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Centre for Socio-Legal Studies (CSLS), University of Oxford. There, she worked with Professor Linda Mulcahy on an oral history of the English and Welsh Rape Crisis movement. This was a partnership project between CSLS, Rape Crisis England & Wales, and National Life Stories at the British Library, and was funded by The National Lottery Heritage Fund.

Ellie holds a PhD from the Oxford Centre for Socio-Legal Studies. Her PhD explored how those working within English sexual violence support services talk about and understand sexual violence. Alongside her PhD, Ellie volunteered for a frontline support service and worked within the policy team at Rape Crisis England & Wales, particularly around the Keep Counselling Confidential campaign. A short film about her collaboration with Rape Crisis England & Wales was produced by the University of Oxford’s Social Sciences Division.

Before beginning her PhD, Ellie read an MSc in Law, Anthropology and Society at the LSE and an LLB at Durham University. She also participated in a year reading Law abroad at the National University of Singapore.

Ellie’s work focuses on the relationship between the criminal justice system and sexual violence support services, from a feminist legal and socio-legal perspective. Her research interests sit within the areas of feminist and queer legal studies, socio-legal studies, socio-legal methodologies, and access to justice. She is particularly interested in poststructuralist feminist analyses of law’s power.

Criminal Law (LL108)

Tort Law (LL143)

Complex Consent Issues [Podcast] Talking about Methods, Frontiers of Socio-Legal Studies (2025)

‘The power and the pain of positionality’ [Book Review] A Good Read, Frontiers of Socio-Legal Studies (2025)

‘Changing the law to support survivors of rape and sexual abuse’. Social Sciences Division, University of Oxford. 2024. https://www.socsci.ox.ac.uk/keep-counselling-confidential; https://www.ox.ac.uk/research/research-impact/impact-films

Burton, M., Cole, A., and Whittingdale, E. ‘Feminist oral history and life stories as a radical methodology’ [Podcast] Talking about Methods, Frontiers of Socio-Legal Studies (2024)

‘The sublime of the everyday: moments of disruption as connection in remote interviews during sensitive research’, Frontiers of Socio-Legal Studies (2022)

‘Feminist methodologies’ [Podcast] Talking about Methods, Frontiers of Socio-Legal Studies (2021)