Élodie Druez defended her PhD thesis in political science at Sciences Po Paris and INED in 2020. It focused on the experiences of racialization and the politicization of university graduates of sub-Saharan origin in Paris and London. She is currently a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Strasbourg (SAGE), within the project "Encounters - Muslim-Jewish Encounter, Diversity & Distance in Urban Europe: Religion, Culture and Social Model". more

Anis Fariji holds a PhD in musicology from the University of Paris 8 ; he is qualified in musicology and anthropology. His research focuses on vocal practices and sound phenomena in Islam, as well as on intercultural dynamics in musical invention in the Arab world. He is currently a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Strasbourg (SAGE), with in the project "Encounters - Muslim-Jewish Encounter, Diversity & Distance in Urban Europe: Religion, Culture and Social Model ». more

Hanane Karimi is Assistant Professor in the Sociology of Islam at the University of Strasbourg (France). Her research focuses on the collective mobilisation of French Muslim women against the extension of religious neutrality as an obligation, new laïcité, Islamophobia, resource circulation, agency and alternative forms of organisation in the field of work/employment. more

Anne-Sophie Lamine is professor of Sociology at Université de Strasbourg, her research concerns religious plurality: religions in public space, interreligious relations, Muslims in France, Islamic medias, rigorism, radicalisation, pragmatist approach of belief. She coordinates RIGORAL (Intensive religiosities, rigorisms and radicalities), a research project funded by the French National Research Agency and an Action-Research about ex-inmates with a radicalization issue. more

Nonna Mayer is Research Director Emerita at the Centre for European Studies and Comparative Politics of Sciences Po/CNRS, former chair of the French Political Science Association (2005-2016) and member of the National Consultative Commission for Human Rights (since 2016), co-PI of its.annual survey on racism. more

Vincent Tiberj (PhD Sciences Po, Paris) is Full Professor of Political Sociology at Sciences Po Bordeaux and researcher at the Centre Emile Durkheim. He has published research on various fields such as electoral behaviour, generational renewal, value systems and prejudices and has works intensively in the field of multculturalism and migrant integration.  On this particular topic he has published with Sylvian Brouard As French as everyone else? (Temple University Press, 2011) and has collaborated or directed several surveys focused on political integration process of migrants and on xenophobic prejudices.  more

Arndt Emmerich is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Max Weber Institute for Sociology at the University of Heidelberg , studying intercultural and interreligious encounters between Jews and Muslims in Germany. Prior to that, he was a Research Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity and a Research Officer with the Changing Structures of Islamic Authority project at the University of Oxford. Using a variety of qualitative research methods, he has focused on generational and institutional transformations within mosque communities in Germany and Britain. more

Samuel Sami Everett (who goes by Sami) is a Research Fellow in the department of Socio-Cultural Diversity where he is research coordinator the Encounters project. He holds a PhD in Politics from SOAS, University of London and a BA in North African Language and Culture from INALCO, Paris. His research focuses on the historical-colonial and spatial-political dimensions of Jewish and Muslim identification. more

Elizaveta Fokina works as a coordinator for the Encounters research project, on Muslim-Jewish encounters in urban spaces. She is a student at the Master’s degree program Interdisiciplinary Studies of the Middle East at the Freie Universität Berlin. She used to work as an editor for the EastEast magazine on arts and culture (2020-2021). more

In December 2011, Matthias Koenig joined the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity as a Max Planck Fellow. He was a Full Professor of Sociology/Sociology of Religion at the University of Göttingen until September 2020 and now holds the Chair for Empirical Macrosociology at the Max Weber Institute of Heidelberg University. more

Alexander-Kenneth Nagel is Professor for the Social Scientific Study of Religion at the Institute for Sociology, University of Göttingen. His research focuses on organized interreligious encounter, interfaith governance in urban areas and religious immigrant communities in Germany. more

Dekel Peretz is Berlin Researche for Encounters. He obtained his PhD in history from the University of Potsdam in 2020. In his dissertation Zionism and Cosmopolitanism: Franz Oppenheimer and the Dream of a Jewish Future in Germany and Palestine Dekel dealt with the history of sociology and Jewish identity in fin de siècle Germany in the context of the racial and colonial discourses. His previous research and publications focused on schools and social transformation in Arab Palestine during the British Mandate, Zionism, utopian thought, colonial fantasies and German memorial culture. more

Vanessa Rau is a Post-doctoral Research Fellow in the Department of Socio-Cultural Diversity. Vanessa completed a Ph.D. in Sociology at the University of Cambridge (2019) focusing on migration and diaspora, religion, secularities, and the politics of identity in diverse urban spaces.  more

Steven Vertovec is the Founding Director at the Max-Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity, and Honorary Professor of Sociology and Ethnology at the University of Göttingen, Germany. Previously, he was Professor of Transnational Anthropology at the University of Oxford, and Director of the British Economic and Social Research Council’s Centre on Migration, Policy, and Society (COMPAS). more

Alyaa Ebbiary is Postdoctoral Research Associate at Durham University, working on the ENCOUNTERS project. She completed a PhD in Social Anthropology at SOAS. Her academic background is in Anthropology and Middle Eastern Studies (Manchester University) and Religious Studies (Lancaster University), and she also trained as a RE teacher (Cambridge). Apart from academia and education, Alyaa has also worked as a community organiser and interfaith facilitator for over 15 years, with a particular interest in the Muslim-Jewish encounter. She currently serves as an Officer of the British Association of Islamic Studies (BRAIS) and is Book Reviews Editor for the Journal of Education in Muslim Societies (JEMS).

Yulia Egorova is Professor of Anthropology at Durham University. Throughout her  work she has explored issues in the study of minority identities, specifically in relation to constructions of difference in public discourses about race and religion, and in the context of science and biotechnology. Her past major projects focused on the context of South Asia and resulted in the publication of The Jews of Andhra Pradesh: Contesting Caste and Religion in South India (with Shahid Perwez, OUP, 2013) and Jews and Muslims in South Asia: Reflections on Difference, Religion and Race (OUP, 2018). Her current research explores the experiences of Jewish and Muslim communities in the UK and debates about definitions of antisemitism and Islamophobia. more

Ben Gidley is a Senior Lecturer in Psychosocial Studies at Birkbeck, University of London, and an associate of the Birkbeck Institute for the Study of Antisemitism. He researches racism, antisemitism, diversity and urban politics in Europe. He is the co-author of Turbulent Times: The British Jewish Community Today (2010, with Keith Kahn-Harris) and co-editor of Antisemitism and Islamophobia in Europe: A Shared Story? (2017, with James Renton). more

Ben Kasstan is a medical anthropologist at the University of Bristol and London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine. His research examines questions and quests around health protection - what it means and according to whom. He is particularly interested in healthcare as a borderland where the state and minorities encounter each other and negotiate each other's positions on the protection of life. He has worked with Jewish and Muslim minorities on issues ranging from child health, sexuality education, and reproductive health. more

Daniella is a Postdoctoral Researcher for the Encounter project at Birkbeck, University of London. Her PhD in Sociology, from the University of Surrey, explored how religion-oriented diasporic communities adapt to an impermanent modernity, entailing field research with faith communities in the UK and USA. Daniella’s previous research was on concepts of ‘home’ in cultural writings of exiled communities. In her research, Daniella seeks to rethink a set of underlying assumptions about characteristics, historicity and dialectical relationships between the ‘traditional’ and the ‘modern’ within late modernity. She has presented papers at national and international conferences on themes of belonging, researcher positionality and flexing community boundaries. Daniella worked for many years in the field of intercultural and interreligious understanding, running programmes and liaising with policymakers on issues of community relations. more