Ilay Romain Ors

Ilay Romain Ors is a research affiliate of the Centre of Migration, Policy, and Society (COMPAS) at the University of Oxford. She is currently based in Greece, working on her research project on Aegean Migrations, funded by the Independent Scholar Research Foundation and under contract by Berghahn Publishers. Her previous publications include Diaspora of the City: stories of cosmopolitanism from Istanbul and Athens (Palgrave, 2018). Dr.Ors is an Associate Professor in Social Anthropology, holding a PhD degree in Anthropology and Middle Eastern Studies from Harvard University.

She is currently working on a project on migration where she investigates the overlapping migratory waves in the Aegean over the course of the last century until today. In addition to the eminent ‘refugee crisis’ at present, she will be taking into account other major episodes of displacement, such as the Forced Exchange of Population between Greece and Turkey in the 1920s. Ors is interested in showing that migration is not a singular linear narrative with a beginning and an end, but involves circular, broken, and overlapping waves that are diverse and disconcerted, which need to be comparatively studied and spatiotemporally contextualized. She is focusing her ethnographic research on various locations in Greece, including Athens and the islands of Lesvos and Leros.