Visiting Postdoctoral Fellow
Joud Alkorani is an anthropologist with a background in Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies. She completed her PhD at the University of Toronto, and is currently an Assistant Professor of Islam Studies at Radboud University in Nijmegen, The Netherlands. Between January and June 2022, Joud will be based in Beirut as a visiting postdoctoral fellow at the OIB.
Broadly speaking, Joud's research explores how changing political, economic, and sociohistorical conditions transform Muslims’ beliefs and practices. In particular, she is interested in the forms Muslim piety takes after the Islamic Revival and the Arab Spring.
Joud's first project was an ethnography of Muslim becoming, believing, and belonging in Dubai. Through fieldwork and interviews with middle-class, migrant Muslim women, Joud examined how Muslims grapple with Islamic ethical practices, theological commitments, and eschatological horizons in their everyday lives. She focused on how these women's endeavors are marked by the contingencies of their living and laboring in Dubai as noncitizens and shaped by state efforts to depoliticize Islam.
During her time at the OIB, Joud will extend the insights of her prior research beyond its ethnographic context to tell a larger story about God-human relations in an increasingly neoliberal, post-Islamic Revival, post-Arab Spring Middle East.