S. Behnaz Hosseini is a visiting research fellow in FRSG Group at the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology of the University of Oxford. She is also a Middle East media analyst with Persian media. Dr. Hosseini has conducted extensive research on minorities in the Middle East and has worked with the United Nations as an expert on ISIS crimes against religious minorities in Iraq. Her most recent publications are Trauma and the Rehabilitation of Trafficked Women: The Experiences of Yazidi Survivors (Routledge 2020) and Yarsan of Iran, Socio-Political Changes and Migration (Palgrave Macmillan 2020). She completed her doctoral studies at the Institute of Oriental Studies, University of Vienna, with a focus on the Yarsan, a religious minority in Iran, and trans-nationalism in Sweden. Her research centers on religious minorities in both Iran and Iraq, forced migration, and integration.
She has participated in multiple projects including "Trafficking and slavery under ISIS: Trauma and rehabilitation of Yazidi female survivors," as well as "Analysis of forced migration and displacement of Iraqi religious minorities in Austria." She worked as a post-doctoral fellow at the department of sociology of the University of Alberta, Canada, on a research project about Iranian religious minorities and conducted research field work on the Kurdish communities in Alberta. Between 2014 and 2017, she visited numerous refugee camps in Iraq and interviewed asylum-seekers in Germany and Austria. She has written a book on Iraqi religious minorities and immigrants in Austria (Lit Verlag, October 2018), focusing on the cultural dynamics of settlement and attempts made by groups to preserve their ethnic and religious identity. During 2017–2018 she carried out research on child marriage and suicide among the Kurdish community in Iran and continues to be involved in same research in Oxford.
