Layla Renshaw is Associate Professor in Forensic Science at Kingston University, where she teaches forensic archaeology and anthropology and supervises undergraduate and postgraduate research in human identification and skeletal analysis. She holds a degree in Archaeology and Anthropology from the University of Oxford, an MSc in Forensic Archaeology from the Institute of Archaeology at University College London, and a PhD in Anthropology, also from UCL. She joined Kingston in 2003.

Her research combines forensic and social sciences in the study of death and burial, with a strong focus on post-conflict and human rights investigations. She has worked as an assistant archaeologist with the UN International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, contributing to the exhumation and identification of war victims in post-war Kosovo, and has also worked in a consultative capacity for a number of UK police constabularies on human identification. One of her primary research areas is the exhumation of mass graves from the Spanish Civil War, on which she conducted extensive ethnographic fieldwork in rural Spain with survivors, witnesses, forensic experts, and relatives of the dead, and published a monograph in 2011. More recently, she has focused on the recovery and commemoration of Australian and British First World War soldiers from Fromelles in northern France, examining processes of human identification, genetic testing, and the engagement of relatives. She has also organised a symposium and edited a special journal issue exploring the broader complexities of recovering war dead from post-colonial contexts.

Biographical details correct as of 07.07.26