Notes on Contributors
Federico Alpi is research fellow at the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia from August 2020. He graduated in Armenology at the University of Bologna and obtained his PhD in Oriental Studies from the University of Pisa in 2015. Since 2009 he has been a member of the AIEA (Association internationale des études arméniennes) and during his academic training he conducted his research abroad on various occasions: in 2008, at the Central Institute for Manuscripts of Yerevan (Republic of Armenia) and in 2013, 2014 and 2015 at the University of Oxford (one term per year). From 2016 to 2018 he was research fellow at the University of Bologna within the project POPLAMA, ‘The universal Rome in cross-cultural perspective. Perceptions of the Orient at the Papal court in the late Middle Ages’. From October 2018 to July 2020, he was junior research fellow at FSCIRE (Fondazione per le Scienze religiose, Bologna). Since October 2018, he has been coordinating, for FSCIRE, the edition of the Armenian section of the Corpus Christianorum—Conciliorum Oecumenicorum Generaliumque Decreta. His research interests focus on Armenian civilization and its contacts with the surrounding worlds between the 7th and the 14th century.
Necati Alkan holds a PhD in History from the Ruhr University of Bochum/Germany and is currently research associate at the University of Bamberg/Germany, where he does research about the Ottoman Turkish translations of Ibn Khaldun’s Muqaddima and its reception among the Ottomans. Alkan is a historian of the late Ottoman Empire and has published about religious (minority groups), intellectual and socio-political aspects of Ottoman history. His most recent publication is the monograph Non-Sunni Muslims in the Late Ottoman Empire: State and Missionary Perceptions of the Alawis (I.B. Tauris/Bloomsbury, 2022).
Gabrielle Angey is Associate Professor at the IRISSO, Université Paris Dauphine—Paris Sciences Lettres. Her work focuses on the sociology of transnational religious movements, and more specifically on the Gülen Movement. She conducted extensive field research in Turkey, South Africa, Kenya and Senegal.
Armand Aupiais is a PhD candidate in Sociology & Anthropology at University of Paris-Diderot lecturer at Galatasaray University (Istanbul) and associate researcher at the French Institute for Anatolian Studies (IFEA, Istanbul). After several ethnographic fieldworks in Pentecostal milieus, his thesis aims to provide an integrated understanding of Evangelicalism in Istanbul, highlighting the interdependencies between the Churches and the consequences of believers’ commitment to religious labour on life trajectories. He has recently published “Ethnographie et désidentifications” (e-migrinter 18, 2019), and “Have You Ever Been Told That God Loves You” (Social Sciences and Mission, 34:1–2 (2021), pp. 92–124).
Katia Boissevain is a social anthropologist specialised in religious anthropology of the Maghreb (Researcher at CNRS). Her main fieldwork is Tunisia. Her doctoral thesis addressed the question of woman sainthood in Islam and the articulation of various religious trends in Maghreb Islam (Sainte parmi les saints. Sayyda Mannubiya ou les recompositions cultuelles dans la Tunisie contemporaine, Paris: Maisonneuve et Larose IRMC, 2006). She went on to studying religious tourism and religious visits and the changing organisation of the pilgrimage to Mecca. Another aspect of her research focuses on religious conversion to evangelical Protestantism in Tunisia and Morocco. Finally, in recent years, she has explored the changes of the celebration of Mouled (birth of the Prophet Mohamed) as a locus of religious and political tensions in Muslim societies. She is currently directing the IRMC (Institut de Recherche sur le Maghreb Contemporain) in Tunis, Tunisia.
Naïma Bouras is a PhD student in sociology at the University Lumière-Lyon II, and Associate fellow at Cedej (Cairo). Her thesis focuses on Egyptian Women Salafi preachers. Through her studies she analyses women’s authorities in the Islamic religious field and the institutionalisation of female preaching in Egypt, from the Islamic Renewal (in the 1970s–1990s) to the renewal of the Islamic discourse (voted in 2014). In her research, she analyses the religious history of the country through the perspective of the itineraries of women involved in Islamic organisations. She has published several articles in Égypte/Monde Arabe, GENDER—Zeitschrift für Geschlecht, Kultur und Gesellschaft, Afrique(s) en Mouvement. She also participated in collective volumes such as in H. Bayoumi & K. Bennafla (eds.) Atlas de l’Égypte Contemporaine, Paris: CNRS Éditions, 2020.
Philippe Bourmaud is Associate Professor at the Université Jean Moulin—Lyon 3 and a member of the Laboratoire de Recherche Historique Rhône-Alpes (UMR 5190), specializing in the modern and contemporary social history of the Middle East. He has travelled extensively to the Palestinian Territories and Turkey, and alongside his work on the medical history of the region, he is currently working on missionaries, wine-making and anti-alcoholism in the late Ottoman Empire and the League of Nations Mandates, as well as on Arabic oral cultures in post-Ottoman Turkey. Since September 2022, Philippe Bourmaud is the Director of the French Institute of Anatolian Studies – Istanbul (USR 3131).
Gaétan du Roy is a researcher at the University Radboud, Nijmegen, working on a collective project led by Heleen Murre-van den Berg, ‘Rewriting Global Orthodoxy: Oriental Christians in Europe between 1970 and 2020’. He is also a lecturer at Saint-Louis University (Brussels) and an Associate researcher at the Centre d’études et de documentation économiques, juridiques et sociales (CEDEJ). His research dealt with the famous garbage collectors of Muqattam, the Zabbaleen, and with interreligious relations in Cairo, as illustrated by his first monograph Les Zabbaleen du Muqattam, ethnohistoire d’une hétérotopie au Caire (1979–2021), Brill, CJMS series 6, 2022. He is now working on Oriental Orthodox communities settled in Europe.
Séverine Gabry-Thienpont is researcher at CNRS/ IDEMEC, currently Assistant director of IDEMEC (CNRS) and co-editor of the series Human and Social Sciences of Diacritiques Éditions and member of the jury of the Michel Seurat Prize. She is currently the PI of the 5-years program ‘Méditerranée(s) musicale(s): technology, circulation and representation, 19th–21st century’ (2022–2026, EFR, EFA, IFAO, Idemec). She was the Co-PI of the 5-years program ‘Christian Missions and Society in the Middle East: organizations, identities, heritagization; 19th–20th centuries’ (2016–2021, EFR, IFEA, IFAO, IFPO, FSCIRE) and the PI of the 5-years program ‘Music to see, Music to hear. Aesthetics, productions and sound techniques in Egypt (19th–21st century)’ (2016–2021, IFAO). Her last publications include: Séverine Gabry-Thienpont and Norig Neveu, Special Issue: “Gender and Mission”, Social Sciences and Mission, 34:1–2 (2021), Brill and Séverine Gabry-Thienpont & Frédéric Lagrange, Special Issue: “Matérialisation, dématérialisation et circulations des musiques au Moyen-Orient, xixe-xxie siècles”, Annales Islamologiques, 53 (2020), IFAO.
Maria Chiara Giorda is Associate Professor in History of Religions at Università degli studi RomaTre, Department of Human Sciences. She holds a Ph.D. from the École Pratique des Hautes Etudes, V section, Sorbonne Paris (2007). As an historian of religions, her research interests encompass religious education, geography of religions, history of monasticism and religious diversity in public spaces. She is co-editor of the book Manuale di Scienze della Religione, Morcelliana, 2019 (with Giovanni Filoramo and Natale Spineto) and of the volume Geography of Encounters: The Making and Unmaking Spaces, Palgrave MacMillan, 2021 (with Marian Burchardt).
Bernard Heyberger is Professor (Directeur d’études) Emeritus at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS, Paris)—chair dedicated to ‘Historical Anthropology of Christians under Islam’, and at Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes (EPHE, Paris)—chair entitled ‘History of Eastern Christians, 16th–21th C’. Historian and Arabist, his research focuses on the study of Eastern Christians under Islam, especially on the Ottoman Syria, on interactions between the Christian minorities and the Muslim society, as well as on the dynamics of contact, opposition and mimicry between Eastern Christians and the West. He gives special attention to the role of Catholicism in the building up of sectarian, ethnic and national identities in the Middle East since the 17th century. His main publications include Les chrétiens du Proche-Orient au temps de la Réforme catholique, Bibliothèque des Écoles Françaises d’Athènes et de Rome, 1994 (second edit. 2014, Arabic transl. in preparation); Hindiyya (1720–1798), mystique et criminelle, Aubier, 2001 (Arabic: Dar Al-Nahar, 2010; English: James Clarke, 2013); Les chrétiens d’Orient, Paris, PUF (Que-sais-je?), 2017, 2. Edit.: 2020.
Émir Mahieddin is a Franco-Algerian anthropologist, CNRS researcher at the Centre d’études en sciences sociales du religieux (CéSor—EHESS) in Paris, France. He is also research associate at the Religion & Society Research Centre (CRS) at Uppsala University, in Sweden. He is specialized in the study of Evangelical and Pentecostal Christianity in Northern Europe, with a special focus on migration. He recently carried out extensive fieldwork among Latin American and Arab Pentecostals living in Stockholm (2018–2020). In 2018, he was granted funds from the Swedish Research Council for his research project ‘Pentecostal Migrants in Secular Sweden: Influences and Challenges’ (2019–2022). His research interests include moral subjectivities, secularism and the anthropology of freedom. He recently co-edited a special issue of the Journal des anthropologues on the latter topic entitled Ethnographier la liberté (with Lucille Gallardo, 2021).
Michael Marten has published widely on Scottish missions in the Middle East in the 19th and 20th centuries, placing these within the broader framework of European imperial control. He seeks to reflect postcolonial, gender, and Critical Religion perspectives in his work, and was the founding editor of the Critical Religion Association. A Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, he has taught at universities in Edinburgh, London, Pavia and Stirling, and is now working in secondary education.
Norig Neveu is a research fellow at the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS)/ IREMAM. Specialist of Contemporary history, she has conducted research for the last ten years in the Middle East, especially in Jordan and Palestine. Her present research focuses on sacred topographies, religious politics and authorities in Jordan, Palestine and Iraq between the 19th and 21st centuries. Thanks to this long-term approach, she observes the evolution of tribal and kinship networks and the reconfiguration of the sources of religious authorities in the region. She has published several articles on local pilgrimages, sacred topographies, religious tourism and its impact on local societies. From 2017 to 2021, she was co-PI and coordinator of the MisSMO research program about Christian missions in the Middle East since the late 19th century (
Maria Chiara Rioli is Assistant Professor of Contemporary History at the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia. She was a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Global Fellow at the universities of Ca’ Foscari in Venice and Fordham in New York. She has been researcher and project manager of the ERC project ‘Open Jerusalem: Opening Jerusalem Archives for a Connected History of ‘Citadinité’ in the Holy City, 1840–1940’, PI Vincent Lemire (2014–2019). Among her publications: A Liminal Church: Refugees, Conversions and the Latin Diocese of Jerusalem, 1946–1956 (Leiden: Brill, 2020).
Karène Sanchez Summerer is Associate Professor at Leiden University (from September 2022, Professor of Middle East Studies, Groningen University). She obtained her PhDs from Leiden University and EPHE (Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, Paris Sorbonne). Her research considers the interactions between European linguistic and cultural policies, missionaries’ modalities and impact and the Arab Catholic communities in Palestine (1860–1948). She is the PI of the research project (2018–2022), ‘CrossRoads—A connected history between Europeans’ cultural diplomacy and Arab Christians in Mandate Palestine’ (project funded by The Dutch Research Council NWO). She is the co-editor of the series Languages and Culture in History with W. Frijhoff, Amsterdam University Press. Her last publications include Sanchez Summerer, K. and Zananiri, S., Imaging and Imagining Palestine- Photography, Modernity and the Biblical Lens (1918–1948) (Leiden/ Boston: Brill, 2021); Irving, S., Nassif, C. and Sanchez Summerer, K., The House of the Priest. A Palestinian life (1885–1954). Leiden/ Boston: Brill, CJMS 7, 2022.
Heather J. Sharkey is Professor and Chair of the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of Living with Colonialism: Nationalism and Culture in the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan (University of California Press 2003); American Evangelicals in Egypt: Missionary Encounters in an Age of Empire (Princeton University Press 2008); and A History of Muslims, Christians, and Jews in the Middle East (Cambridge University Press 2017). She has edited Cultural Conversions: Unexpected Consequences of Christian Missionary Encounters in the Middle East, Africa, and South Asia (Syracuse University Press 2013); with Mehmet Ali Doğan, American Missionaries in the Modern Middle East: Foundational Encounters (University of Utah Press, 2011); and with Jeffrey Edward Green, The Changing Terrain of Religious Freedom (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021).
Ester Sigillò is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Bologna and Adjunct Professor at Georgetown University. She was previously Max Weber Fellow at the European University Institute. She holds a Ph.D in Political Science from the Scuola Normale Superiore. Her research interests include social movements and Islamic activism in the Maghreb. In the framework of her doctoral activities, she served as visiting fellow at the Institut de recherche sur le Maghreb Contemporain (IRMC) in Tunis and as a research fellow of the ERC project TARICA ‘Political and Socio-institutional Change in North Africa: Competition of Models and Diversity of Trajectories’. Her most recent publications include (with Fabio Merone and Théo Blanc) “The Evolution of Tunisian Salafism after the Revolution: From La Maddhabiyya to Salafi-Malikism” in International Journal of Middle East Studies 53 (2021): 455–470 and “Islamism and the rise of Islamic charities in post-revolutionary Tunisia: claiming political Islam through other means?” in British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, n/a (2020):1–19.
Sébastien Tank-Storper is Researcher at CNRS and a member of the Center for Social Sciences of Religion (CéSor) at EHESS. He has studied, over the last twenty years, how conversions and the logic of religious circulation have helped reshape institutions and relations with religious authorities within contemporary Judaism. He has notably published Juifs d’élection. Se convertir au judaïsme, Paris: CNRS Éditions, 2007, and coordinated, with Lucine Endelstein and Yoann Morvan, the issue of Archives de sciences sociales des religions entitled Mondes juifs en mouvement. Frontières, porosités, circulations, 177 (2017): 15–187.
Emanuela Trevisan Semi is Senior researcher in Modern Hebrew and Jewish Studies at the University of Ca’ Foscari (Venice). She has published books, essays and articles in international journals on the topic of Jewries at the margins, on Karaites, on Jews of Ethiopia, on issues about memory among Moroccan Jews, on movements of conversion to Judaism and on the literature of the Mizrahim. Among others: (with Tudor Parfitt) Judaising Movements, London: Routledge-Curzon, 2002; Jacques Faitlovitch and the Jews of Ethiopia, London: Vallentine Mitchell, 2007 (with Hanane Sekkat Hatimi); Mémoire et représentations des juifs au Maroc: les voisins absents de Meknès, Paris: Publisud, 2011; Les karaïtes un autre judaïsme, Paris: L’Harmattan, 2013 (nouvelle postface); Conversioni all’ebraismo, Roma: Bonanno, 2016; Taamrat Emmanuel, an Ethiopian Jewish Intellectual between colonized and colonizers, CPL editions: Primo Levi Center New York, 2018.
Annalaura Turiano is a Postdoctoral researcher affiliated with IREMAM and member of the research network EGY-Class led by Marie Vannetzel (CNRS). She currently coordinates the project “Philanthropic action and development in the Middle East: actors, practices and expertise (20th–21st centuries)”, funded by the IFAO. She has been a postdoctoral fellow at École française de Rome and Freie Universität and a member of the MisSMO project. Her research interests include missionary education, Mediterranean migrations, and philanthropy in modern Egypt and the Eastern Mediterranean. Her last publications include “Masculinity, Industrial Education and Fascism in Egypt. The construction of gender in the schools of the Salesian mission in Egypt (1900–1939)”, Social Sciences and missions, 24/2021: 1–32.
Vincent Vilmain is Associate Professor at the University of Le Mans. His research as part of TEMOS (UMR 9016) focused on the history of Judaism (Les femmes juives dans le sionisme politique (1897–1921) Féministes et nationalistes?, Paris: Honoré Champion, coll. “Bibliothèque des études juives,” 2018); minorities (co-edited books including L’Histoire des minorités est-elle une histoire marginale? Paris: Pups, 2008; and Religions et Frontières, Paris: CNRS Éditions, 2012); and the history of racial thought (co-edited Dictionnaire des racismes, de l’exclusion et des discriminations, Paris: Larousse, 2010). He is currently working on the relation between religion and race, as PI of the ANR RelRace research project. He is also the co-director of IPRA (Institute of Religious Pluralism and Atheism), and an associate member of GSRL (Society Religion Secularism Group—UMR 8582 EPHE/CNRS).