I am a cultural anthropologist with expertise in the intersectional study of religion, gender, sexuality and race, as well as in comparative ethnography of religion, interreligious encounters, mixed couples, race-religion constellations, and religious conversion.
Since February 2022, I am working as a researcher in the VIDI project ‘Unequal Partners? An Ethnographic Study of Christian-Jewish and Christian-Muslim Couples in the Netherlands’ at the Faculty of Religion and Theology. This project takes an ethnographic approach focused on mixed couples involving one partner embodying the norm of (secularized) Christianity and one partner belonging to a Muslim/Jewish minority. This specific focus stems from the finding that mixed couples are microcosms for analysing societal norms, inequalities, and social change. Combining theory and ethnography, this project offers rich data on whether and to what extent these couples are affected by the Dutch cultural archive. It will also provide a fascinating laboratory to understand the creative ways in which they tackle societal and intimate prejudice. This in turn will help to better understand some of the complexities related to antisemitism and Islamophobia.
