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Angéla Kóczé is Associate Professor and Chair of the Romani Studies Program at Central European University in Vienna and Budapest. She is a sociologist whose research and teaching span critical Romani studies, gender studies, critical race theory and political sociology. Her scholarship examines anti-Roma racism, racialization, structural violence and the intersections of gender, ethnicity and class, with particular attention to Romani women’s activism, knowledge production and experiences of social and legal inequality in post-socialist Europe.
Her monograph, Romani Women at the Edge of Neoliberal Europe: Discursive Emancipation and Structural Violence (Manchester University Press, 2026), draws on long-term ethnographic research to analyze how racialized poverty, gender inequality and neoliberal restructuring shape Romani women’s lives. It demonstrates how European inclusion frameworks may reproduce structural violence while also foregrounding Romani women’s strategies of resistance, solidarity and political transformation.
Kóczé has edited and co-edited numerous publications, including Daróczi Ágnes: Hosszú az út előttem (Magvető, 2023), The Roma and Their Struggle for Identity in Contemporary Europe (Berghahn, 2020, with Huub van Baar), and The Romani Women’s Movement: Struggles and Debates in Central and Eastern Europe (Routledge, with Violetta Zentai, Jelena Jovanović and Enikő Vincze). She is a founding and publishing editor of the journal Critical Romani Studies and co-editor of two book series in Romani Studies: Critical Romani Studies Book Series - CEU Press, Amsterdam University Press (Founding Co-Editor with Marton Rovid) https://www.aup.nl/en/series/critical-romani-studies-book-series-ceu-press; Berghahn book series: New directions in Romani Studies, Berghahn: Oxford- New York: (co-Editor with Huub van Baar) https://www.berghahnbooks.com/series/romani-studies
In 2025/26, Kóczé was a Jean Monnet Fellow at the Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies at the European University Institute. She was also a Visiting Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Vienna in 2025 and previously taught in the Department of Sociology and the Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program at Wake Forest University. From 2012 to 2016, she was principal investigator of the Hungarian Scientific Research Fund project Institutionalization of Roma Politics after 1989 in Hungary.
Her scholarship and public engagement have been recognized through the Ion Ratiu Democracy Award from the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in 2013, the Beth Rickey Award from the Bard Center for the Study of Hate in 2023, and the Emma Goldman Snowball Award in 2025.
Before her full-time academic career, Kóczé served as Senior Policy Adviser in the Hungarian Government (2004-2008), Executive Director of the European Roma Information Office in Brussels (2003-2004), Director of Human Rights Education at the European Roma Rights Centre (1998-2003), and founding director of Romaversitas (1996- 1997), a pioneering scholarship and mentoring program for Roma university students.
