Barbara Oomen holds a chair in the Sociology of Human Rights at Utrecht University. This is a small appointment, next to her fulltime position as president of the HZ/University of Applied Sciences in Zeeland. 

Until June 2022, professor Oomen worked at University College Roosevelt, UU's Liberal Arts and Sciences College in Middelburg, where she was the Dean from 2012-2016. Her research concerned the interplay between law and society, with a special emphasis on human rights and cultural diversity. She wrote books like Global Urban Justice: the rise of human rights cities (2016) and Rights for others: the slow home-coming of human rights in the Netherlands (2014, both Cambridge University Press) and a wide variety of scholarly articles. She lead the NWO Vici project Cities of Refuge and was involved in the Horizon2020 ETHOS research. In Utrecht, she is one of the leaders of the focus area on Migration and Societal Change.

At UCR, Barbara Oomen taught courses like the Introduction to Law, Society and Justice, the Introduction to Human Rights, Constitutional and Administrative Law and Rhetoric and Argumentation. She is a board member of the Roosevelt Foundation and the Human Rights Cities Network, and a former member of the Advisory Board of the Netherlands Human Rights Institute, the Constitutional Review Commission and the Netherlands Advisory Council on Human Rights, the Netherlands Helsinki Committee and the jury of the Max vd Stoel award. She also sat on the editorial board of the Journal of Legal Pluralism and the Netherlands Quarterly of Human Rights.

In 2016-2017, Barbara Oomen was a senior Fernand Braudel fellow at the European University Institute in Florence. In 2019, she set up a large program on the energy transition in Zeeland, the Young Energy Society Challenge.