Duygu Erbil is a researcher in life writing and memory studies. Her research centres on witnessing as a cultural and political practice, with a particular focus on how witness narratives rearticulate the meanings of crime and justice.

She is currently a Flemish Research Council (FWO) postdoctoral fellow at Ghent University, undertaking the project Witnessing Solitary Confinement: Carceral Memories and Abolitionist Memory Work in the United States. This project surveys the practices of witnessing deployed in anti-solitary confinement activism in the US since the 1980s to generate a critical cultural study of prison testimony. It aims to contribute to our understanding of the American prison movement, carceral memory, the relationship between memory and activism, and the role of witness narratives in establishing alternative visions of justice.

Before joining Ghent University, Duygu was affiliate researcher at the Institute for Cultural Inquiry at Utrecht University, where she completed her PhD as part of the ERC-funded project Remembering Activism: The Cultural Memory of Protest in Europe. Her articles have appeared in several edited volumes, Memory Studies, Memory, Mind & Media and the artistic journalism platform ArtsEverywhere.  She is the co-editor of Remembering Contentious Lives (Palgrave Macmillan, 2025) with Ann Rigney and Clara Vlessing.