Dr. Kristen Sarah Biehl has been acting as an Assistant Professor at Sabanci University’s Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences (FASS) since 2021. Between 2018 and 2021, she was a Researcher at Sabanci University’s Women and Gender Studies Center of Excellence (SU Gender). Since 2006, she has been academically and professionally involved in intensive research within the migration and asylum field in Türkiye, having worked closely with a wide range of international, national, and local actors and different migrant and refugee communities.

Her research centres on ethnographies of migration, diversification, and urban change, governing effects of migration and asylum policy frameworks, and gendered impacts of migration. She is currently the coordinator in Türkiye on two international EU-funded projects called ReROOT (2021-2025) and Whole-COMM (2021-2024), examining the impacts of post-2015 migrations at different territorial scales at the ethnographic and policy levels. In recent years, she has also started researching different issues related to environment and climate change, including a former project investigating how civil society in Türkiye working in the fields of migration and environment incorporate gendered approaches into their work and organisational culture and a current project, as well as a current project examining local political and social dynamics of climate change in Türkiye’s southern Aegean region, following, especially the 2021 July-August wildfires.

She obtained a DPhil in Social and Cultural Anthropology from the University of Oxford (2018). She holds an MA degree in Sociology from Boğaziçi University (2008) and a BA in Social Anthropology and Development Studies from SOAS (2005).