We are pleased to announce the appointment of two new Departmental Lecturers who will be teaching on the MSc in Refugee and Forced Migration Studies from October.
Dr Evangelia (Lilian) Tsourdi will join us as Departmental Lecturer in International Human Rights and Refugee Law from September for three years. Dr Ali Ali, currently Research Officer on the RSC project The Politics of the Syrian Refugee Crisis, will take up the post of Departmental Lecturer in Forced Migration for one year while Professor Alexander Betts is on sabbatical.
Dr Tsourdi’s expertise lies in EU, Public International, Human Rights and Public Law. She joins us from the European University Institute in Florence where she has been a Max Weber Fellow (2016-2017). She has also recently completed a doctorate at the Université libre de Bruxelles (ULB) on the administrative governance of the EU asylum policy. She holds LLMs in International Human Rights Law (University of Essex) and Public International Law and a BA in Law (National and Kapodistrian University of Athens), and is an attorney of the Athens Bar Association.
Dr Tsourdi has research and policy experience in asylum and migration with NGOs, UNHCR and the EU institutions, including as policy advisor to a Member of the European Parliament. She has been a research associate at the ULB, the Université catholique de Louvain and the Migration Policy Centre of the EUI, and conducted research stays at Queen Mary University of London (QMUL) and the EUI. She has co-moderated an EU asylum law module in the MA course ‘Refugee Protection and Forced Migration Studies’ of the School of Advanced Studies, University of London, and also guest lectured in LLM modules on International Refugee Law and EU Asylum and Migration Law (QMUL since 2014; ULB since 2015).
Dr Ali is currently working on The Politics of the Syrian Refugee Crisis project at the RSC, which compares policy towards Syrian refugees in Lebanon, Jordan and Turkey. His previous research at the London School of Economics examined the socio-economic implications of the war in Syria during which time he conducted fieldwork in Turkey in regions bordering Syria in 2013 and 2014. The research examined activists’ use of technology to challenge the state, security in opposition areas, and the political economy of war. His doctoral work at the University of East London addressed the relationship between displacement and state-transformation in occupied Iraq and the coercive transformations of space that took place in Baghdad with implications for displacement.
We are happy to welcome both of them onto the teaching staff.
For information on the MSc, please visit: http://www.rsc.ox.ac.uk/msc