Visiting Fellows
- Current
- Past
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Dr Emanuelle Degli Esposti
Research Interests: European Shi’ism.
Research at Cambridge: “Fighting for “Justice”, Engaging the Other: The Public Face of European Shi’ism.
email: ed530@cam.ac.uk
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Mr Ahmed Paul Keeler
Research Interests: Western world cultural narratives, cultural narratives in the Muslim world, the arts of Islam, modern art.
Research at Cambridge: Exploring the Quranic principle of Mizan as realised in Islamic civilisation.
Paul published his book, Rethinking Islam and the West, in 2019 and produced a video to accompany the launch.
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Dr Julian Hargreaves
Research Interests: British Muslim communities, social science and statistics, as well as issues around diversity and equality.
Research at Cambridge: currently focuses on police stop and search, community responses to counter-extremism, and local patterns of intolerance across the UK.
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Dr Ryan Williams
Research Interests: The study of Islam and society and contemporary religion. Understanding the lived experiences of Muslims in connection with themes of belonging and social cohesion, piety and ethics, and state power and multiculturalism
Research at Cambridge: the experience of Muslims in the British Criminal Justice System.
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Dr. Sertaç Sehlikoglu
Research Interests: Social anthropology, subjectivity, gender, and desire, the interconnections between the visible and invisible, tangible and intangible.
Research at Cambridge: Populism, Islam, and empire and the way such political aspirations are connected to global politics to populism, toxic nationalism, and imaginative/emotional visions of total domination as major challenges to social and political life.
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Dr Alice Wilson
Research Interests: Political and economic anthropology of the Middle East and North Africa, liberation movements, revolutions, northwest Africa, Oman.
Research at Cambridge: Legacies of the former liberation movement in Dhufar, southern Oman, especially in kinship, everyday socialising and ongoing platforms for progressive politics.
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Dr. H.A. Hellyer
Research Interests: Politics, international relations and religion, in the West and the Arab world; the geopolitics of the wider Arab world; Western Muslim communities; contemporary Islamic studies; extremist groups; the mainstreaming of far-right in the West. More at www.hahellyer.com.
Research at Cambridge: Dr Hellyer is on the steering committee for the EU Horizon 2020 project on ‘Radicalisation, Secularism and the Governance of Religion’, researching 23 countries on 4 continents, in conjunction with 12 universities. Among other publications, he will also separately produce a monograph on recently deceased 20th/21st century Western Sufi scholar.
His most recent articles are:
– In Politico magazine on ‘Arab spring, European winter’
– In Jadaliyya magazine on ‘Powerful Scholars and Clerics of Power: Remembering Shaykh Emad Effat’ -
Professor Yasir Suleiman
Professor Yasir Suleiman was the founding Director of the Centre of Islamic Studies, His Majesty Sultan Qaboos Bin Sa’id Professor of Modern Arabic Studies, and a Fellow of King’s College, Cambridge. His research covers the cultural politics of the Middle East with special focus on identity, conflict, diaspora studies and modernisation in so far as these issues relate to language, modern Arabic literature, translation and memory. He also conducts research in Arabic grammatical theory and the Arabic intellectual tradition in the pre-modern period. Professor Suleiman is Chair of the Panel of Judges, British-Kuwaiti Friendship Society Book Prize in Middle Eastern Studies. In 2013 Professor Suleiman was elected as Chairman of the International Prize of Arabic Fiction (IPAF) popularly known in the Arabic-speaking world as the ‘Arabic Booker’. He serves as Trustee on the Boards of the following organisations: Arab-British Chamber Charitable Foundation, Banipal Trust for Arab Literature and is Trustee of the Gulf Research Centre-Cambridge. He is also Board Member of the Islamic Manuscript Association, Chair of the Centre for the Study of the International Relations of the Middle East and North Africa (CIRMENA), Cambridge and Member of the Advisory Board of Our Shared Future, a joint project of the British Council, USA and Carnegie Foundation. He is a member of the editorial boards of a number of journals and book series. In October 2013 Professor Suleiman was made Ambassador of the University of Sarajevo for his outstanding contribution to promoting the University internationally.
Professor Suleiman is Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE), a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, and formerly Head of the Department of Middle Eastern Studies, the University of Cambridge.
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Dr Elizabeth Key Fowden
Islam in the Greek world is an abiding theme in Elizabeth Key Fowden’s research, which draws on architectural, visual and textual sources to analyse cultural, religious and intellectual exchange. Spanning from late antique Syria to Ottoman Greece to the late nineteenth-/early twentieth-century Aegean to contemporary Arab art, her publications include The Barbarian Plain: Saint Sergius between Rome and Iran (1999), Studies on Hellenism, Christianity and the Umayyads (with Garth Fowden, 2004), ‘The lamp and the wine flask: Early Muslim interest in Christian monasticism’ (2007), ‘Jerusalem and the work of discontinuity’ (2019), ‘The Parthenon Mosque, King Solomon and the Greek Sages’ (2019) and ‘The circle in the work of Kamal Boullata’ (2021). She is currently completing a monograph, The Parthenon Mosque.
Fowden’s collaborations with CIS have included the exhibition, Jerusalem in Exile: Artist’s Books by Kamal Boullata and its associated symposium in January 2020, at Jesus College, and a forthcoming workshop on Mediterranean embroideries, co-organised with former CIS Research Associate Deniz Türker, with the support of Tim Whitmarsh and the Cambridge Centre of Greek Studies, to be hosted at the Mohammed Ali Research Center in Kavala, Greece, as part of the Cambridge-Stockholm Collaboration on ‘Greece between Europe and Asia: regionality, religion, and culture’ (2020-2023), of which Fowden is a co-PI.
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Prof. Egdūnas Račius
Research Interests: Muslim communities and governance of Islam in post-communist countries.
Research at Cambridge: Imam training and Muslim ecclesiastical structures in South-Eastern Europe and Central Asia.
Contact: egdunas.racius@vdu.lt
Recent Publications:– Muslims in Eastern Europe, Edinburgh University Press, 2018 (https://edinburghuniversitypress.com/book-muslims-in-eastern-europe.html)– Islam in Post-Communist Eastern Europe: Between Churchification and Securitization, Brill, 2020 (https://brill.com/view/title/57060)– Muslims of Post-Communist Eurasia ( Galina M. Yemelianova and Egdūnas Račius, eds.), Routledge, 2022 (https://www.routledge.com/Muslims-of-Post-Communist-Eurasia/Yemelianova-Racius/p/book/9780367545154)
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Mr Martin Rose
Research Interests: Morocco generally, language and culture, and the interaction of faiths.
Research at Cambridge: the Moroccan community in Manchester and the trade in silver plate.
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Dr Sara Betteridge
Research Interests: Incorporating Religion into therapy, Muslim experiences of mental health, Islamic interpretations of mental health issues, Psychological, Social and Spiritual theories on Psychosis.
Research at Cambridge: Muslim Mental Health in Britain.
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Dr Shana Cohen
Research interests: public services; non-profit organizations; political alienation in North Africa; inequality; comparative values of social justice and social good.
Research at Cambridge: contemporary values and practices of social good and society within Judaism, Islam, and Christianity.
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Dr Abdelwahab El-Affendi
Research interests: democracy and Islam; violence; democracy and insecurity.
Research at Cambridge: violence; democracy and insecurity.
Click here to read first year report by Visiting Fellow Dr Abdelwahab El-Affendi
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Dr Jeremy Henzell-Thomas
Research interests: comparative linguistics; Islam and pluralism; cross-cultural education; shared values.
Research at Cambridge: human faculties in the Qur’an and Islamic tradition and their implications for the reform and development of authentic Islamic education.
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Mr Mohammed Abdul Aziz
Research interests: equality and human rights; race, religion and cohesion; developing narratives.
Research at Cambridge: a granulated understanding of British Muslim grass-roots communities and theologies.
Click here to view a report by Visiting Fellow Mohammed Abdul Aziz
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Dr Yousef Meri
Research interests: medieval Islamic history and civilisation; Jews of Arab lands in pre-modern and modern times; academic study of Muslim-Jewish relations; memory and history; history of religions, ritual studies; pilgrimage, saints and sacred objects in Islam, Judaism and Christianity; sacred space.
Research at Cambridge: a book project on memory among Muslims and Jews in the Islamic World.
Click here to read first year report by Visiting Fellow Dr Yousef Meri
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Ms. Hacer Z. Gonul
Research interests: Ethnic and religious minorities in China particularly ethnicity, radicalization, Islam in China, securitization with a special focus on Hui and Uyghur communities.
Research at Cambridge: Negotiating Islam in China and Being a ‘Muslim’ in China.
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