Marina de Regt is Associate Professor and Programme Director of the Bachelor and Master at the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology of the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. She received her PhD from the University of Amsterdam in 2003. She specializes in gender, labour, migration and development in the Middle East and the Horn of Africa, and in particular Yemen and Ethiopia. Marina is co-chair of the South-South Exchange Programme for Research on the History of Development (SEPHIS) (sephis.org), editorial board member of American Ethnologist and Hawwa: Journal of Women in the Middle East, North Africa and the Islamic World, board member of WO&MEN@VU and affiliated with the VU Gender Research Network. 

Marina's research expertise lies in the field of gender and migration with particular attention for (migrant) women's paid work in Yemen and Ethiopia. She has studied a wide variety of topics such as women's work in the Moroccan carpet sector, female health care workers in a development project in Yemen, migrant domestic workers in Yemen, and adolescent migrant girls in Ethiopia. In addition, she has a keen interest in the history of migration between Yemen and the Horn of Africa and has done, and is still doing, research about Yemenis of mixed Yemeni-African descent (so-called muwalladeen). Last but not least, she is interested in feminist research methodologies and in particular in the role of friendship in the field.

Marina has published extensively in high ranking journals such as Gender & Society, Signs, Critical Asian Studies, Gender, Work & Organization, the Journal of Eastern African Studies, North East African Studies and Refuge: Canada's Journal on Refugees. Her first monograph Pioneers or Pawns: Women Health Workers and the Politics of Development in Yemen was published by Syracuse University Press (2007). She co-edited (with Bina Fernandez) Migrant Domestic Workers in the Middle East - The Home and the World (Palgrave Macmillan 2014), and published together with Katarzyna Grabska and Nicoletta Del Franco the monograph Adolescent Girls Migration in the Global South - Transitions into Adulthood (Palgrave Macmillan 2019). Marina regularly writes blogs for Standplaats Wereld, the departmental blog (www.standplaatswereld.nl), and short articles for non-academic journals. 

From 2017 - 2020 Marina was the Principal Investigator of  the WOTRO funded project "Syrian Refugee Youth in Jordan: Early Marriages in Perspective". In 2021 she led a research project about people of mixed Yemeni-African descent in Yemen which was commissioned by the Sana'a Center for Strategic Studies.

In addition to academic publications, Marina aims to dissemminate her research results to a wider audience. She has been involved in various filmprojects, namely:

- Young and Invisible: African Domestic Workers in Yemen (Arda Nederveen Productions 2007)

- Time to Look at Girls: Adolescent Girls Migration in the Global South (2016)

- 2 Girls (award winning documentary) (2016)

- Studying Sensitive Issues: The Importance of Involving Syrian Refugees in Research on Early Marriage (2019)

Marina is the initiator of the website Lives in Perspective (www.livesinperspective.org) and one of the initiators of the Jemencast, a podcast in Dutch about Yemen (together with Anthon Keuchenius and Sam van Vliet). 

Marina de Regt teaches in the Bachelor, Master and PhD programme. The most important courses are the Bachelor courses "Identity, Diversity and Inclusion" (together with Ismintha Waldring) and "Beyond Gender Inequalities" (first with Lorraine Nencel and since 2024/2025 with Lise Woensdregt) and the Master course "Theoretical Orientation in Social and Cultural Anthropology" (with other colleagues from the Department). She is also involved in the Graduate course "Decolonization and Beyond" (designed by Claudio Pinheiro). In addition, she supervises Bachelor, Master and PhD students. She regularly gives guestlectures about gender, migration and development issues, with a special focus on Yemen and Ethiopia.

Marina de Regt has obtained a number of research grants throughout her academic career. Her post-doctoral research was funded by an individual WOTRO grant (2004-2006). She obtained an individual fellowship at Humboldt University for the academic year 2011/2012. Together with Katarzyna Grabska and Nicoletta Del Franco she succesfully applied for funding from the Swiss Network for International Studies for the collaborative research project on adolescent girls migration (2014-2016). Her last collaborative project about early marriages among Syrian refugees in Jordan was funded by WOTRO again (as part of the Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights programme) (2017-2020).

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