Leila Ullrich

Leila is an Associate Professor of Criminology at the University of Oxford and a Fellow at Worcester College. She works at the crossroads of international criminal justice, transitional justice, victimology, border criminology and counterterrorism. She is particularly interested in how global criminal justice institutions create gendered and racialized subjects, and how these subjects (victims, refugees and racialized communities) engage with and resist these processes in Kenya, Uganda, Lebanon and the UK. She approaches these questions using feminist, decolonial, and critical political economy theories. Her first book, Victims and the Labour of Justice at the International Criminal Court: The Blame Cascade was published in 2024 with Oxford University Press. In 2025, she was awarded a Leverhulme Research Fellowship for her new project called: ‘The Labour of Prevention: Global Counterterrorism, Gender and the Participation Agenda’. Before her current position, Leila was a Lecturer in Law at Queen Mary University of London and a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Oxford. In 2017, she received her PhD in Criminology from the University of Oxford, which explored the International Criminal Court’s victim engagement in The Hague, Kenya and Uganda. She is a coordinating editor of Feminist Legal Studies and also sits on the editorial board of Theoretical Criminology and OUP's Clarendon Studies in Criminology series.

Leila is currently pursuing three research projects: 1) building on her doctoral work, she continues to analyse the labour of victim participation in domestic and international criminal justice, 2) she works on her British Academy and Leverhulme Trust funded research  on the interplay between terrorism, counter-terrorism and gender based on multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork in Lebanon, Kenya and the UK, and 3) she works on the possibilities and challenges of distant, digital and decolonial knowledge production based on her WhatsApp research with Syrian refugees in Lebanon.

Leila teaches ‘Criminological Theory and Criminal Justice’, ‘Transitional Justice’ and ‘Race and Gender’ on the MSc in Criminology and Criminal Justice, and convenes and teaches on the FHS Criminology and Criminal Justice option. She supervises DPhil students in her areas of research.

Outside the academy, Leila worked as social stability analyst on the Syrian refugee crisis at the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) in Lebanon. She was also the Convenor of the Oxford Transitional Justice Research (OTJR) network and worked for the International Criminal Court (ICC).