Derya Özkaya joined the Centre for Middle Eastern and North African Politics on October, 2015 as a researcher in the project of “Political Participation, Emotion and Affect in the Context of Socio-Political Transformations using the example of ‘Tahrir’ and ‘Taksim’.” She is also conducting her PhD at the Free University in Berlin.

Upon graduating from Sociology and Political Sciences departments at Istanbul Bilgi University in 2012, she immediately started her M.A. in the Cultural Studies Program at Sabancı University, Istanbul. During her graduate study, she worked as teaching assistant for Humanity and Society (SPS 101) courses offered by Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences (FASS) at Sabancı University. She also worked as workshop facilitator in the Gender and Women's Studies Forum and as teaching assistant in the Academic Support Program at Sabancı University between 2012 and 2015.

She completed her M.A. thesis entitled “Commemorative Practices and Narratives of Revolutionary Movements in Turkey: ‘Kızıldere’ as a Texture of Memory” in 2015. Her thesis centered on the commemorative practices of state-sponsored violence in the case of the Kızıldere Massacre (1972), and how these practices mobilize the memory of “Kızıldere” for contemporary political movements in Turkey. Her research interests include social movements, collective memory, commemorative practices, revolutionary movements in Turkey, collective emotions and affect.