Our People

Dr Ilka Vari-Lavoisier

Fellow, Junior Research Fellow

Research Fellow

Department of Education

Dr Ilka Vari-Lavoisier holds a BA in Political Science (Science Po, Aix-en-Provence), a joint master’s degree in Social Sciences (ENS/EHESS, Paris), and a PhD in Sociology from the École Normale Supérieure de Paris. She held a Procter Fellowship at Princeton University (2013 – 2015) and a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania (2015 – 2017), before joining the University of Oxford, in 2018. Ilka has been collaborating with various constituencies of the University, including the Migration and Mobility Network, the Department of Sociology, and the School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography, where she retains affiliations. She is currently a Research Fellow at the Department of Education where she works on international mobility as part of a project led by Dr Maia Chankseliani.

Ilka specialises in international migration and transnational mixed-methods research design. Her research focuses on the migration and development nexus (visit her website for more information). Over the years, she developed an interdisciplinary approach to international migration in collaboration with economists, anthropologists, geographers, sociologists, social psychologists, and cognitive scientists (see her publications for more information).

She taught research methods at UPenn, the Universite Cheikh Anta Diop, the University of Luxembourg, and the University of Oxford, with a focus on mixed methods research and web-based surveys. She has a keen interest in hybrid pedagogy and further developed her expertise in digital media methods in recent years. In collaboration with academics, videographers, and media specialists, she runs video training programmes for several departments. Passionate about video, Ilka runs video training programmes and has also produced several short films for the University of Oxford.