Filiz is a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at the Mortara Center for International Studies at Georgetown University. She received her doctoral degree from the Department of Political Science at University of Washington in Summer 2017. She also received a certificate in Comparative Law and Society Studies (CLASS).

Filiz’s research examines law and social change from international and comparative perspectives. Her dissertation, Claiming Labor Rights as Human Rights: Legal Mobilization at the European Court of Human Rights, provides a comprehensive analysis of the causes and consequences of mobilizing labor rights at an international human rights court. Analyzing the legal mobilization of labor activists at the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR), Filiz argues that this move from the domestic to the supranational arena has altered governance of employment relations, transformed mobilization strategies, and led to an expansion of human rights law.

As part of her research agenda, Filiz created an original database of labor cases brought before the ECtHR (n=1,267) to examine whether and how the ECtHR’s jurisprudence on labor rights has expanded over the years. She trained and supervised a team of 14 undergraduate students to construct this database. Moreover, in order to better understand the local dynamics of activism, she conducted fieldwork in Turkey and the UK.

Work from this research was published in Law & Social Inquiry. She has also been invited to contribute a co-authored article to the Annual Review of Law and Social Science and another article to an edited volume, forthcoming from University of Toronto Press.

Filiz has been awarded numerous fellowships and grants, including the Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Grant from the National Science Foundation, the David J. Olson Graduate Fellowship for Labor Studies, the EU Center of Excellence Graduate Research Grant, the Chester A. Fritz and Boeing Fellowships for International Research and Study, and Individual Research Grant from the Harry Bridges Center for Labor Studies. Her work was also recognized by the Stuart Scheingold Prize for Best Graduate Student Paper in Public law.