Maggie Neil

Maggie Neil is the Pedro Arrupe Fellow in Forced Migration Studies at the Refugee Studies Centre and Campion Hall, Oxford. She holds an MSc and DPhil from the University of Oxford, and a BA from Yale University.  

Maggie is broadly interested in understanding what studying migration and life in borderlands can teach us about how people negotiate relations between self and other, and state and society in contemporary times.  

Her first research project was an ethnographic investigation of migration-related hospitality discourses and practices across urban and rural contexts in Sicily, at the EU’s southern border. She argued that hospitality can manifest as a search for control, and is often the grounds for seeking change of the self and the community via the figure of the foreigner.  Findings from this and related work have been published or are forthcoming in book chapters and articles including in the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, Italian Studies, and Modern Italy.   

She is currently working on a second project, exploring motherhood as a theoretical lens for rethinking care and protection in displacement.  

Outside of academia, Maggie has worked with grassroots NGOs in Europe, the US, and China. She has also worked as a consultant for the Open Society Foundations and the UNDP. She has written on Italian policy on LGBTQ+ rights and a on rights for agricultural workers. Maggie is fluent in French and Italian.