The year is 2007 and I had just started my studies at University College Roosevelt (UCR), when I took my first class in “Modern Sociology.” Coming from a family of hard scientists I disliked being assigned to such a wishy-washy course. But my parents advised me to stay rather than switch courses, listen openly, and see whether I like it. They knew better. A few weeks later, I had fallen in love with Habermas, Bourdieu and Goffman. And a few weeks after that, I decided that I never wanted to leave university again.

I’m an academic at heart. I love teaching, research, or quite simply the idea of two or more people involved in a process of exchanging knowledge. Over the years I’ve changed my mind on the where – whether learning happens in a seminar room, a conference hall, in a train car, at the dinner table, or over Zoom doesn’t matter. In fact, we should use each occasion and every medium.

After completing my B.A. in Social Science from UCR, I pursued two postgraduate degrees, the first one being an LL.M. in Public International Law from Utrecht University and the second one an M.Phil in International Relations from the University of Cambridge. I received my Ph.D in Law (or rather, sciences juridique) from the Université libre de Bruxelles in 2016. After a brief period as a lecturer at Tilburg University, I am now a tenured Assistant Professor in Law and Sociology at UCR as well as a Fellow of Utrecht University’s Netherlands Institute for Human Rights. As from summer 2024, I am also a Petar Beron Research Fellow at South-West University in Blagoevgrad, Bulgaria, on a project financed by the Bulgarian National Science Fund (BNSF).

My research

Since beginning my doctoral research in 2012, my research has focused on the rights of vulnerable migrants. My Ph.D. thesis examined whether the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) and the Court of Justice of the EU have strengthened the protection of migrant rights through legal development, individual remedies, and broader strategic impact. An expanded version of my thesis, titled Demanding Rights: Europe’s Supranational Courts and the Dilemma of Migrant Vulnerability was published by Cambridge University Press in 2019 (see Books).

The primary focus of my research revolves around understanding and explaining the specific challenges faced by migrants throughout Europe. For a while, I have approached this inquiry by examining these experiences as “migratory vulnerabilities” that, while not inherent but constantly changing, affect individuals in ways comparable to factors like race, gender, or sexual orientation. Migration creates issues of inequality even if courts, decision-makers, and large parts of society, do not normally present it as such. It’s this tension that my research (and teaching) has been exploring for a while.

My current research project, titled “Towards an Organizing Principle for the Legal Protection of Vulnerable Migrant Rights in Europe” (PROME), builds on this understanding. Specifically, I takes a cue from sociological and political theories of exclusion to get a better conceptual grasp why judicial institutions, including the ECtHR, continuously fail to protect migrant rights. Theorists that feature in this analysis include, among others, Hannah Arendt, Julia Kristeva, Zygmunt Bauman, but also more recent theories of racialization and racial exclusion. PROME is running as a “Petar Beron” project funded by the BNSF from July 2024 through November 2025.

From 2017 to 2021, I was the Senior Researcher at the Cities of Refuge research project led by Barbara Oomen at Utrecht University. During this time our team analyzed when, how, and why cities and their local governments use human rights as law and discourse in debates on migration. Particularly interesting are hereby the different approaches that one can observe between countries, regions, localities of different sizes and resources, and legal systems. In fact, it’s by looking at the law and legal processes that we can discern the specific strategies of divergence that cities employ. The Cities of Refuge project also produced a podcast of the same name, for which you can find archived episodes on this page.

The thread running through all these themes is, obviously, human rights. I consider myself a human rights scholar insofar as it is the one area in which my knowledge is broad as well as reasonably specific. But I also find it fascinating that human rights have proven resilient in the face of strong and well-founded theoretical criticism, as local activists around the world demonstrate every day. In that sense, I would describe myself as a “critical critical” human rights scholar.

Getting around

I’ve had exceptionally many opportunities to engage in academic mobility. This included enriching stays during my time as a Ph.D. researcher at iCourts at the University of Copenhagen and Duke Law School (you can find a recorded lecture in which I present my early findings). In autumn 2016, I spent a very productive month as a Grotius Scholar at Michigan Law School starting to convert my thesis into what would later become Demanding Rights – though the visit will also always be memorable for seeing President Barack Obama speak on the day before the U.S. elections. In 2021, finally, I was a Schuman-Fulbright Scholar at the University of California, Los Angeles and the UCLA Center for Immigration Law and Policy.

In recent years I have given guest lectures (some online) at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, the International Institute of Social Studies, Central European University, the University of Florence, the University of Milan, Sciences Po Paris, Northeastern University, Tilburg University, and Université libre de Bruxelles.

My failures

Following the recent trend, I want to share a representation of my failures in terms of rejection rates (as per July 2023):

The charts are self-explanatory. However, I would question the “common wisdom” that such rejections offer important learning moments. They can, occasionally, but mostly they just sting. They tell you that somebody was better, on some measure, for someone, at some particular moment in time. Sometimes, a position is filled from the outset.

What I can say, after some years in academia, is that trust in oneself and one’s work is essential. As students, we learn from an early age to seek external validation in terms of grades, distinctions, and awards. This can be problematic in the long term. In fact, studies by psychologists Edward Deci and Richard Ryan have proven that these external rewards “can actually taint a person’s feelings about the basic worth of the project and undermine intrinsic motivation.” In short, we should be aware that there is a tension between internal motivation and outside demands.