My name is Ianika Tzankova and I am a full professor of Global Dispute Resolution and Mass Claims. Born and raised in communistic Bulgaria, I studied (Dutch) law at Tilburg University (1992-1997) and defended my PhD on 'Access to Justice in Mass Disputes' in 2007. I am proud to hold the first European chair in that field, established in 2007. I was a Fulbright Visiting Scholar at Stanford University in 2012, where I co-taught a course on transnational litigation and have been a Visiting Professor at Paris Dauphine University since 2017.
I am facinated by classical legal themes as Access to Juctice, but also by more relatively novel phenomena, such as Collective Redress and Mass Claims, Private Enforcement, Judicial Case Management, Litigation Funding and the impact of all of that and of new technologies on the Legal Profession.
Currently, I serve as the Academic Director of the university's Honours Outreaching Program and as Academic Director of the Global Law Bachelor program, where I am in charge of external affairs and student career development. My course on Civil Procedure and Global Dispute Resolution and the interactive methods used in the course were featured in the program of the Ministry of Education of the Netherlands during a state visit to Canada in May 2015. It was awarded the Innovation Challenge award of the Dutch Ministry of Education in 2016: a price that I am proud to (symbolically) share with my academic colleagues and collaborators Profs. Deborah Hensler (Stanford), Jasminka Kalajdzic (Windsor) and Axel Halfmeier (Leuphana).