We are delighted to offer a warm welcome to our Visiting Fellows for Michaelmas term 2025.
This term, our fellows are:
Arbie Baguios is a PhD in International Development candidate at the London School of Economics, where he is writing his dissertation on the political economy of markets in Kakuma refugee camp, Kenya. Drawing from critical development and refugee studies, Arbie is investigating how market institutions (such as property rights and skills training) emerge in refugee camps; how these institutions shape production networks (specifically, the vegetable and AI production networks) inside the camp; and how refugees’ incorporation into these networks, in turn, shape refugees’ self-reliance. Read more
Desislava Dimitrova is a graduate in Law (Universidad de Málaga, 2021), Master’s in Law (Universidad de Málaga, 2023) and Master’s in Diplomacy and International Relations (Diplomacy School of Spain, 2025). She is currently a PhD candidate in International Public Law and Constitutional Law and an attorney of the Bar Association of Málaga. She has been a trainee at the Constitutional Court of Spain for a period of a year and a half from November 2023 until May 2025. Read more
Gianna Eckert is a Doctoral Candidate at the University of Bristol’s Law School and a Research Affiliate at the Refugee Law Initiative with interests across migration, asylum and human rights law. Her research explores the legal boundaries of states’ deportation powers and compares the legal construction of non-removability in the UK and Germany. To this end, her PhD project traces the law’s reaction to and framing of practical and legal impediments to removal and makes sense of the various laws governing the construction of non-removability. Read more
Raksha Gopal is a PhD candidate in International Relations/Political Science at the Geneva Graduate Institute and a researcher at the Gender Centre where she is a part of the ‘Gendering Survival from the Margins’ project, funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF). Her doctoral research uses ethnographic methods to document and analyse the gendered dimensions of forced displacement and refugee governance in India, with a focus on how Rohingya refugee mothers negotiate everyday insecurity, exclusion, and care in conditions of prolonged statelessness. Read more
Natalie Dietrich Jones is Senior Research Fellow at the Sir Arthur Lewis Institute of Social and Economic Studies (SALISES) at the University of the West Indies Mona campus. Her interests include geographies of the border, governance of migration, and intra-regional migration in the Caribbean. Natalie is Chair of the Migration and Development Cluster, an interdisciplinary group of researchers exploring contemporary issues concerning migration in the Caribbean and its diaspora. Read more
Dr Sari Nauman is a Pro Futura Scientia Fellow at the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study, as well as a member of the Young Academy of Sweden. She currently holds a position as Senior Lecturer at the University of Gothenburg. Nauman is an early modern historian with a background in political science and philosophy. Her work is characterized by its transdisciplinary approach, combining historical sources with social science theories, often from a transhistorical perspective. At the RSC, Nauman will develop conceptual tools for refugee history in the project ‘”Refugee” and “IDP”: Challenging Concepts in Refugee History’. The results will feed into her book project on early modern IDPs. Read more
Dr Andrea Verdasco is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellow (UKRI funded) at the Thomas Coram Research Unit, UCL Social Research Institute. She is a social anthropologist with a theoretical interest in the anthropology of forced migration and refugee studies. Her research interests focus on issues around refugee families, motherhood, childhood, identity, relatedness and belonging. In her current project, 'Family reunion and refugee integration: the impact of the 'deserving refugee mother in the context of the UK', she investigates how refugee mothers navigate complex bureaucratic systems in the East of England. Read more