Dr Columba Achilleos-Sarll

• PhD Politics and International Studies, University of Warwick
• MPhil International Relations, University of Oxford
• PGCHE Postgraduate Certificate in Higher Education

Columba Achilleos-Sarll joined POLSIS in September 2021 after completing her PhD at the University of Warwick. Before joining Birmingham, Columba was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Vienna, an affiliated research fellow at the Austrian Institute for International Affairs, and a visiting researcher at the Centre for Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Yale University. 

Her primary research examines the United Nations Security Council’s ‘Women, Peace and Security’ (WPS) agenda. Beyond the WPS agenda, Columba’s research extends to feminist foreign policy, visual global politics, and civil society. She is author of Advocating for the Women, Peace and Security Agenda (Oxford University Press, 2026) and co-editor of Feminist Foreign Policy: Energy and Resistance (Bristol University Press, 2026). She is currently Principal Investigator on a British Academy/Leverhulme Trust small grant project: Feminist Foreign Policy: Map, Policy, and Power, which will produce a digital archive, website, and map of feminist foreign policy.

Columba's research has been recognised with several awards from professional associations including, most recently, the 2026 Bertha Lutz Prize awarded by the Diplomatic Studies Section (DPLST) of the International Studies Association (ISA) for her research on women in diplomacy, broadly defined, and the Outstanding Early Career Researcher Award in the School of Government at the University of Birmingham as part of its 2026 Research and Impact Awards. 

• Global History (UG)
• Gender, Peace and Insecurity (PGT)

Dr Achilleos-Sarll is interested in supervising PhD students in the following areas: feminist and post/decolonial approaches to international relations; the Women, Peace and Security agenda; civil society and advocacy; visual global politics; feminist foreign policy.

Current Students

(Co-supervising with Dr Danielle Beswick) Scarlet Elliott-Vass, ESRC Studentship: ‘Sub State Translations: Exploring the Localisation of the Women, Peace and Security Agenda in Uganda’.

(Co-supervising with Katherine E. Brown & Sameera Khalfey) Kirby Ferran: 'Evaluating the Gendered Biases of UK Counter Terrorism Architecture: Responding to Women’s Radicalisation'

Research Interests

Dr Achilleos-Sarll’s research focuses on several areas:

• The Women, Peace and Security Agenda
• Civil society and advocacy
• Visual global politics
• Feminist Foreign Policy

Memberships: International Studies Association (ISA); British International Studies Association (BISA)

Columba co-convenes with Dr Emma A. Foster the Gender and Feminist Theory research group, a vibrant research group hosted in POLSIS which brings together academics and students across the institution interested in gender and feminist theory.