Notes on Editors and Contributors
About the Editors
Fouad Gehad Marei
is a Research Fellow at Lund University. He specializes in Middle East politics, Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies, Material Religion, Digital Religion, and conflict stabilization and transformation. He published several articles in the journals of Religion and Society, Political Geography, Islam and Christian-Muslim Relations, Leadership and Developing Societies, and Religion, Media and Digital Culture.
Yafa Shanneik
is Visiting Professor of Islamic Studies at Lund University. Her research focuses on the intersections between Islam, gender, and migration in Europe and the Middle East. She is the author of The Art of Resistance in Islam: The Performance of Politics among Shiâi Women in the Middle East and Beyond (Cambridge University Press, 2022).
Christian Funke
is an independent scholar of Religious Studies, with a focus on Iran and Islamic societies. His research includes ritual studies, Material Religion, and Islam and politics in contemporary societies. Since 2019, he works in the government sector.
About the Authors
Sara Kuehn
teaches Islamic mysticism, aesthetics, art and cultural history at the University of Vienna, Austria. Working at the interdisciplinary juncture of (art) history, anthropology, theology, and religious and cultural studies, she has been conducting ethnographic fieldwork on Sufism in Europe for 25 years.
Stefan Williamson Fa
is a Visiting Research Fellow at the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, University of Oxford. His work focuses on the anthropology of Islam, sound and the senses in Turkey, the Caucasus and Europe.
Ines Weinrich
is a researcher at the University of Münster, Germany. She is the Principal Investigator of the bi-national research project âHindu-Muslim-Jewish Origin Legends in Circulation between the Malabar Coast and Europe, 1400s-1800sâ funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) and the German Research Foundation (DFG).
Maryam Aras
is a doctoral researcher in Iranian Studies at the University of Bonn and an independent literary critic. Her essayistic monograph on the erasure of Iranian and transnational activism from German memory culture of 1968 is forthcoming in 2025.
Sana Chavoshian
is a Research Fellow at the Leibniz Zentrum Moderner Orient (ZMO) in Berlin, Germany. Her work lies at the intersection of material religion, atmosphere studies and war ecologies. Her book Women, Martyrs and Stones in Post-War Iran is forthcoming.
Ingvild Flaskerud
is affiliated with the University of Oslo. She is the author of Visualizing Belief and Piety in Iranian Shiism (Continuum, 2010), co-editor of Muslim Pilgrimage in Europe (Routledge, 2018), and producer of the ethnographic film Standard-bearers of Hussein (2003).
Nada Al-Hudaid
is a filmmaker and Research Fellow at the Department of Arts and Cultural Sciences at Lund University in Sweden.
Marianne Hafnor Bøe
is Professor in the Study of Religions at University of Stavanger, Norway. She has researched and published widely on Shiâi Muslim communities, Islamic family law, gender and feminist activism in Iran and Norway.
S. M. Hadi Gerami
is Assistant Professor of Islamic and QurʾÄnic Studies at the Institute for Humanities and Cultural Studies in Tehran, Iran. His research expertise lies in history of ShiÊ¿ism and Prophetic Tradition (ḥadÄ«th) as well as Anthropology of Religion, and theory and method in Religious Studies.
Ali Imran Syed
is a graduate of the Islamic College of England and an independent researcher and educator based in Toronto.
Amelia Gallagher
is Professor of Religious Studies at Niagara University. She has written about Alevi poetry, modern pilgrimage in Turkey, and Alawi (Nusayri) shrines. Most recently, she curated an exhibit of religious artifacts for the Castellani Museum.
Hakim Sameer Hamdani
is Design Director at INTACH Kashmir and author of The Syncretic Traditions of Islamic Religious Architecture of Kashmir (Routledge, 2021) and Shiʿism in Kashmir: A History of Sunni-Shiʿi Rivalry and Reconciliation (IB Tauris, 2022).
Christiane Gruber
is Professor of Islamic Art at the University of Michigan. Her scholarly work explores medieval to contemporary Islamic art, especially figural representation, depictions of the Prophet Muhammad, manuscripts and book arts, architecture, and modern visual and material cultures. She is the author of The Praiseworthy One: The Prophet Muhammad in Islamic Texts and Images (Indiana University Press, 2019).
Katja Rakow
is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Utrecht University in the Netherlands. She currently works on âPracticing Textsâ, a material approach to the study of religious texts and textual practices. She is co-editor of the journal Material Religion: The Journal of Objects, Art, and Belief.