A HUMANITARIAN and anthropologist who founded the world’s first institution for the study of refugees has died aged 85.

Professor Barbara Harrell-Bond OBE founded the Refugee Studies Centre, part of Oxford’s Department of International Development, in 1982 and remained its director until 1996.

She is also remembered as a relentless advocate of legal aid programmes for refugees and helped found such organisations across the world.

In 2005, Prof Harrell-Bond, who lived in Summertown, Oxford, was made an Officer of the Order of the British Empire for her contributions to refugee studies.

Prof Harrell-Bond was born on November 7, 1932, and raised in Aberdeen, South Dakota.

She attended Asbury College in Kentucky where she studied music.

Prof Harrell-Bond went onto teach music. It was also around this period she married and had three children: Deborah, Stephen and David.

She began studying anthropology at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, in 1965 where she earned an MLitt and a DPhil in social anthropology.

After studying in Oxford, Prof Harrell-Bond conducted research in West Africa from 1967 to 1982, while employed by the departments of anthropology at Edinburgh University and Illinois-Urbana, University, the Afrika Studiecentrum in Leiden and the Faculty of Law at Warwick University.

In the early 1980s, Prof Harrell-Bond undertook research around improving the performance of humanitarian agencies in the field.

During fieldwork in Algeria she realised there was scarcity of academic literature available on the subject.

On her return to Oxford she founded the Refugee Studies Centre (then known as the Refugee Studies Programme).

The RSC started with a weekly seminar and rapidly gained momentum as a focal point for the study of refugee issues. From the beginning, the RSC aspired to bridge the divide between scholarship, policy and practice.

Oxford University, in a statement following the professor’s death, said that refugee rights were far more than an academic pursuit for Prof Harrell-Bond.

Rather, she was passionate about keeping the issue at the centre of the humanitarianism agenda and at the forefront of public consciousness. It was a life-long commitment that she advocated for until the day she died.

On retirement from the RSC, she led research in Kenya and Uganda and was Honorary Adjunct Professor at the American University in Cairo from 2000 until 2008.

She wrote the seminal text Imposing Aid: Emergency Assistance to Refugees in 1982.

Prof Harrell-Bond was awarded the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in 2005 for ‘services to refugee and forced migration studies’. She was also a recipient of the Franz Boas Award for Exemplary Service to Anthropology awarded by the American Anthropological Association and several other honours.

In recent years, Prof Harrell-Bond had been responsible for running the information portal, Refugee Legal Aid Information. The portal promotes legal assistance for refugees around the world.

In 2013 it became a component of the International Refugee Rights Initiative, which issues the monthly refugee legal aid focused newsletter, Rights in Exile.

After stepping down as the director of Oxford’s Refugee Studies Centre, Prof Harrell-Bond stayed connected to its activities, and visited as recently as June, for a screening of a documentary about her life and work: ‘Barbara Harrell-Bond: A Life Not Ordinary’.