Keynote Speakers

Professor in Global Studies 

Incoming Visiting Fellow, Refugee Studies Centre, University of Oxford (Trinity Term 2026)

Michelle Pace is a Professor of Global Studies based in Roskilde, Denmark, and a leading scholar in migration, human rights, democracy, and global governance. During Trinity Term 2026, she will be a Visiting Fellow at the Refugee Studies Centre, University of Oxford, where her research will focus on displacement, mobility, and the political and ethical challenges surrounding migration. Her work bridges academic research and policy debates, with particular attention to security, labour markets, integration, and human rights in a global context.

Adjunct Lecturer in Migration and Security Politics

Department of Political Science, University of Crete

Georgia Dimari is an Adjunct Lecturer in Migration and Security Politics in the Department of Political Science at the University of Crete, Greece. She is a scholar of migration, securitization, desecuritization, and European migration governance, whose research zooms in on the ways migration and asylum are framed, governed, and contested in Greece, the Eastern Mediterranean, and the wider European context. Her scholarship pays particular attention to the intersections of security, mobility, political culture, and public policy, while also examining the political and ethical challenges surrounding contemporary migration. Bridging academic research and policy analysis, her work engages with questions of human rights, social inclusion, border governance, labour market integration, and desecuritization strategies in migration policy.

Istabul University

Nurcan Ozgur Baklacioglu is professor at the Political Science and International Relations Department of the Faculty of Political Science, Istanbul University. Herself a refugee of 1989 , she got masters degrees from Istanbul University and Central European University in Budapest. Her PhD dissertation elaborated on the 20th century history of Albanian migrations to Anatolia. Dr.Ozgur studies Turkish and Muslim minority politics, migration, crossborder politics and dual citizenship in the Balkans. Since 1995 she has implemented numerous fieldworks in N. Macedonia, South Albania, Kosovo, Bosnia-Herzegovina, East Croatian borders, North Greece, and Bulgaria. Since 2005 she has studied human rights, disability and gender dimensions of asylum policy in Türkiye. She has studies on engendering the Syrian refugee crisis and border management across different parts of the world, gender solidarity strategies and refugee youth access to HE.