Ilay Romain Ors was born and raised in Istanbul, where she completed her undergraduate education at Bogazici University in Political Science and Sociology. After a year at the University College London doing an M.Sc. in Social Anthropology, she pursued her Ph.D. degree at Harvard University in Anthropology and Middle Eastern Studies. Her dissertation fieldwork on the Greek Orthodox community of Istanbul was later revised and published under the title Diaspora of the City: stories of cosmopolitanism from Istanbul and Athens by Palgrave Macmillan in 2018. 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. Her upcoming book on the subject is under contract with Berghahn.

Biographical details correct as of 07.04.26