Lea Müller-Funk is currently a Research Fellow at the German Institute of Global and Area Studies, where her research focuses on migration aspirations and drivers in (forced) migration, migration and refugee governance, and diaspora politics with a geographical focus on the Middle East, North Africa and Europe. Previously, she was a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Research Fellow at the Department of Sociology at the University of Amsterdam and a postdoctoral fellow at the Department of Politics and International Relations at the University of Oxford. She earned a joint PhD in Comparative Politics and Arabic Studies (summa cum laude) from the Centre des Recherches Internationales (CERI) at Sciences Po Paris and the Department for Near Eastern Studies at Vienna University in 2016. Methodologically, she applies different approaches including in-depth and life history interviews, survey research, mixed methods, content analysis, and online ethnography.
Before her PhD, she was a trainee at the Department of the European Council and the Council of the European Union at the Austrian Foreign Ministry (2010-2011). She attended Vienna University (BA in Political Science, 2009; Magister in Arabic and Islamic Studies, 2010), the Institut National des Langues et Cultures Orientales in Paris (2007/2008), and Sciences Po Paris (MA in Comparative Politics / Middle East and Muslim World, 2010). Lea has held research affiliations to the Institut français du Proche-Orient Beirut (2018), the Migration Reseach Center at Koç University (2018), Nuffield College (2017), the Netherlands-Flemish Institute in Cairo (2012) and the American University Beirut (2009).