Aurélie Villanueva

Aurélie Villanueva is a legal scholar specializing in the intersection of culture and EU law. She is an assistant professor at the University of Groningen and holds a PhD in Law from the European University Institute. Her PhD dissertation ‘Culture in EU Law: Between Market and Society’ (2023) was awarded a prize by the European Law Faculties Association.

Aurélie studied and worked across Europe. She holds an LLM in European Competition Law and Regulation from the University of Amsterdam, an LLM in European Law from the University of Leiden and a Bachelor in law from the University of Strasbourg. She also completed two years of classe préparatoire alongside her bachelor’s degree and participated in an Erasmus exchange at Stockholm University.

Aurélie served as a trainee at the legal service of the European Commission and Aurélie has been a lecturer at the Université Catholique de Lille and University of Wageningen.

Beyond research and teaching Aurélie is committed to bridging academia and society. She has organised public events on European democracy, guided students in debates within the Conference on the Future of Europe and created platforms for researchers to share their findings with the public.

Contact: aav7273@nyu.edu

Research Project

Law and Culture in European Union Law: An interdisciplinary framework for theorizing culture. Culture defines who we are, unites us, and extends beyond mere production. Yet, in the European Union (EU), the idea of a common culture, what makes Europeans, Europeans, remains a taboo. While it can be explained by the competence design of the EU, reserving culture as an area of competence that remains for the Member States, the cultural taboo has practical legal consequences. EU law often treats culture primarily as goods and services, overlooking that culture is also defined as the common features of a group, their behaviours or traditions. This creates a disconnection between EU law and the lived realities of European citizens. The project adopts a law and culture approach to deepen the theoretical understanding of culture within EU law. How is EU law shaping a European culture? How is an emerging European culture in turn shaping EU law? While law and culture approaches have developed from the late 19th century in the United States and in the United Kingdom, such approaches have not been fully deployed within EU law scholarship. The project aims to fill this gap by following a law and culture approach to deepen the understanding of the relationship between law and culture within EU law.