Giulia Liberatore

Lecturer in Muslims in Europe

  • Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies
  • Alwaleed Centre
  • Sociology

Contact details

Address

Street

Room G.3
19 George Square

City
Edinburgh
Post code
EH8 9LD

Availability

  • On appointment

Biography

Background

I am Lecturer at IMES and Sociology and an academic lead on the Muslims in Europe research theme at Alwaleed.

I am broadly interested in researching and writing about the creative ways in which people make sense of themselves, others, and the world around them in moments of social and political change or in contexts of marginalisation or inequality. I have been exploring this topic through long-term ethnographic work with Muslims in Europe.

My first monograph, Somali, Muslim, British: Striving in Securitized Britain (2017) was based on my doctoral work. It chronicles the aspirations of different generations of Somali women as they respond to publicly charged questions of what it means to be Muslim, Somali, and British.

My Leverhulme-funded project (2015-2019) on female Islamic scholarship and guidance in the UK described the dynamic and multi-layered ways in which female leaders understand their own gendered authority, Islamic knowledge, and their work with Muslim women in a context that often problematises them.

In 2019 I am starting a new ERC-funded project on Multi-Religious Encounters in Urban Settings with Ammara Maqsood (UCL) and Leslie Fesenmyer (Birmingham). The project will theorise inter-religious interactions in non-secular contexts through comparative ethnographic work in Italy, Pakistan, and Kenya. It will be exploring what it means to live with difference by starting from the lived experiences and everyday encounters of religious people.

I have a PhD in Anthropology from the London School of Economics (LSE) and prior to coming to Edinburgh I worked at the Centre on Migration, Policy and Society (COMPAS), University of Oxford.

Postgraduate teaching

 

 

Open to PhD supervision enquiries?

Yes

Research summary

Keywords: Islam in Europe, politics of multiculturalism, Somali diaspora, public religion, religious authority and leadership, sociology and anthropology of Britain, sociology and anthropology of Islam, gender and subjectivity, religious diversity and cohabitation

Project activity

Multi-religious Encounters in Urban Settings (MEUS)

 

 

 

Current project grants

ERC Starting Grant, Horizon 2020

Past project grants

Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship, for a project on 'Female Muslim Leaders in Britain: Transnational Publics and Changing Forms of Leadership and Authority in Britain'

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