Duygu Erbil is an interdisciplinary scholar and an affiliated researcher of the Institute for Cultural Inquiry at Utrecht University. Her research focuses on the interactions between life narratives, cultural memory, activism and legal discourses. She is particularly interested in the politics of witnessing in activism and the role of cultural remembrance in (re)defining crime and justice. 

In 2024, Duygu defended her PhD, “Remembering Deniz Gezmiş”, which was part of the ERC-funded project Remembering Activism: The Cultural Memory of Protest in Europe. Her dissertation developed a cultural materialist framework to study ‘memory work’, cutting across literary and cultural studies, the political economy of media, cultural and political history, and the sociology of culture. During her PhD, Duygu taught Life Writing at Utrecht University, co-chaired the Memory Studies Association’s Memory and Activism Working Group and co-organised the International Auto/biography Association's Students and New Scholars Network.

Working across different fields of study, Duygu’s published work examines a wide variety of cultural forms, such as court files, protest ephemera, literary journalism and TV shows. Besides her historical work on Turkey’s criminalised revolutionary movement and prison literature, Duygu’s interest in crime and justice discourses extends to the carceral regime in the United States and American prison writing.