Gökce Yurdakul is Georg Simmel Professor of Diversity and Social Conflict at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. She is also an affiliated member at the transdisciplinary gender studies program. Yurdakul was the Director of Berlin Institute of Migration and Integration Research (BIM, 2022-2024) and Director of the Institute of Social Sciences at her university (2019-21). Her project "MENBELONG: Belonging for Single Migrant Men: A Cross-Country Comparative Perspective" received ERC Advanced Grant in 2025. 

Yurdakul received her PhD at the University of Toronto, Department of Sociology in 2006. Her areas of interest are immigration, gender, intersectionality and citizenship as well as qualitative methods. Her research was funded by national and international grants, such as Social Sciences and Humanities Research Grant in Canada (SSHRC), German-Israeli Scientific Foundation (GIF), Federal Ministry of Family (BMBFSJ) and Berlin University Alliance (BUA) among others. She was a Weatherhead Scholar at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at the Harvard University in 2019, where she was affiliated with the Comparative Inequalities and Inclusion Research Cluster. She was a visiting scholar at the University of Witswaterrand in South Africa (2015), University of South Pacific in Fiji (2024) through Erasmus Keyaction Grant, University of Sussex in the UK through European Partnership Development Grant (2024) and Mahidol University, Bangkok, Thailand through ERC-PMU-B grant (2025).

Yurdakul has published numerous journal articles, two monographs and three edited collections on the issues of Muslim immigration to Europe and North America. Her publications include From Guest Workers into Muslims: The Transformation of Turkish Immigrant Associations in Germany (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009); The Headscarf Debates: Conflicts of National Belonging (Stanford University Press, 2014, equal co-authors with Anna C. Korteweg, translated into German and published by transcript Verlag in 2016).  Her article on the border experiences of  Muslim trans*women migrants from Bulgaria received the best article award in the Council for European Studies' Gender and Sexuality Network in 2020 (co-authored with Altay and Korteweg). Yurdakul is a co-editor of the Oxford Handbook on Intersectional Approaches to Migration, Gender, and Sexuality (Oxford University Press, forthcoming in 2026, co-editors with Jean Beaman, Liza Mügge, Sarah Scuzzarello and Sirijit Sunanta). 

Yurdakul has supervised 13 doctoral dissertations to completion as first supervisor. She has been an active member of numerous national and international scientific committees, such as selection committees for academic jobs and PhD students, review committees for academic grant applications and scientific reports, as well as departmental accreditations. She has extensive experience in different levels of university administration over a decade. 

Yurdakul actively leads and participates in programs that provide a safe academic environment for researchers who face threats or persecution in their home countries. She hosted scholars at risk through Philipp-Schwartz-Initiative by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation and Einstein-Foundation grants. She is the co-founder and advisory board member of Afghanistan Research Hub at her university.

You can find Yurdakul's publications here.