Derya Özkul is a research officer at the Refugee Studies Centre at the University of Oxford. She is working for the project entitled Refugees are Migrants: Refugee Mobility, Recognition and Rights, led by Prof Cathryn Costello. This project examines refugee status determination and protection mechanisms in four different countries, including Lebanon, Kenya and South Africa. The project aims to explore the workings of various protection mechanisms, in particular, alternatives to individual refugee status determination, as well as status determination by UNHCR, and the questions surrounding its accountability in that context.

Derya Özkul completed her doctorate at the University of Sydney and previously worked for a number of Australian Research Council-funded projects including Syrian and Iraqi Resettlement Outcomes in Australia and Social Transformation and International Migration in the 21st Century which investigated the processes of migration in the context of the broader processes of social transformation. Before her PhD, Derya worked as a researcher at the Migration Research Centre at Koc University in Istanbul. She holds an MSc degree in Comparative Politics from the London School of Economics and a BA degree in Political Science from Bogazici University in Turkey. As a DAAD alumnus, she held fellowships at Berlin Social Science Center (WZB) and Bielefeld University in Germany. She has published on precarious work, refugee resettlement, immigration and diversity policies in Turkey, Germany and Australia. Her work includes Social Transformation and Migration (Palgrave, 2015) and a forthcoming book on Alevis in Turkey and abroad.