The International Association for the study of Religion and Gender elected a new board at its IARG – General Assembly on 27 November 2018 in Gent:
Prof. Dr. Ulrike E. Auga (President)
Humboldt University of Berlin; Canterbury Christ Church University
Prof. Dr. Ulrike Auga, born in East Berlin, is professor for Gender, Cultural and Religious Studies. She is member of the Center for Transdisciplinary Gender Studies, Humboldt University of Berlin (HUB) and the Center of Theological Inquiry (CTI), Princeton and works as visiting professor at the Intersectional Center for Inclusion and Social Justice (INCISE), Canterbury Christ Church University (UK). She is a founding member of the German Gender Studies Association and a member of the International Research Association of Institutions of Advanced Gender Studies (RINGS).
She is co-founder and president of the IARG and co-editor of the IARG Book Series Routledge Critical Studies in Religion, Gender and Sexuality. She underwent an agricultural training and studied Theology and Philosophy in Berlin, Cambridge (UK) and Geneva. Several years of international research followed: 1999-2001 in Johannesburg; 2001-02 in Bamako and 2002-04 in Jerusalem. Ulrike Auga taught at the professorship for Gender and Religious Studies at HUB in 2008-16. In 2013-14, she received the Bonhoeffer Foundation Award and taught at Columbia University, New York.
In her research, she works on the construction and regulatory models of religious and secular knowledge about gender, collective bodies and life in comparison of religious communities (Judaism, Christianity, Islam), and questions those on the relationship between religion and (epistemic) violence and agency. Her scientific work includes the interface of human rights, gender and religion as well as discourses on health and sexual rights as human rights including HIV / AIDS. With a focus on feminist epistemology and critique, she combines gender and queer theory with postcolonial and post-secular approaches. Ulrike Auga invented “religion” besides gender as de-essentialised, intersectional category of knowledge.
Homepage http://www.ulrikeauga.com
Email ulrike.auga@hu-berlin.de
Phone +49 (0)30 54080035
Prof. Dr. Kristin Aune (Vice president), Coventry University
Kristin Aune is Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for Trust, Peace and Social Relations, Coventry University, where she leads the Faith and Peaceful Relations Research Group.
Her research is on gender, religion, feminism and higher education, and she has published widely on these topics, including co-editing the book Women and Religion in the West: Challenging Secularization (with S. Sharma and G. Vincett, 2008). Recent publications include the Social Compass special issue ‘Is secularism bad for women?’ (edited with M. Lövheim , A. Giorgi, T. Toldy and T. Utriainen, 2017) and an article on third-wave feminism in the UK in the journal Feminist Theory (2018). She is an editor of journal Religion & Gender, and series editor with Anna Fedele, Kim Knibbe and Laurel Zwissler, of Routledge’s Gendering the Study of Religion in the Social Sciences series.
Dr. Lana Sirri, Maastricht University
Lana Sirri is an assistant professor in Gender and Religion at the Centre for Gender and Diversity (CGD) at Maastricht University, the Netherlands. She completed her Ph.D. studies at the Centre for Transdisciplinary Gender Studies at the Humboldt University of Berlin in 2016. Her research lies at the intersection of religion and gender and critically explores Islamic feminist thought, emphasizing its historical development and its diverse theoretical frameworks and methodologies, focusing on the conceptualization of Religion, Gender, and Sexuality.
Lana has published articles on the topic of Islamic feminism and Muslim feminist thought. She also completed a book titled “Einführung in den Islamischen Feminismus” (2017) which introduces Islamic feminism to a non-academic audience of German-speaking activists. Lana is an associated expert of the Centre for Intersectional Justice and is a co-founder of the Berlin Muslim Feminist Group and the Black and PoC Academic Network in Germany.
Prof. Dr. Chia Longman, Gent University
Chia Longman (PhD 2002 in Comparative Sciences of Culture) is Associate Professor in Gender Studies at the Department of Languages and Cultures at Ghent University, Belgium. She directs the Research Centre for Culture and Gender and is Programme Director of the Inter University Master Programme in Gender and Diversity. Her primary research focus is women’s identity and agency within different religious communities and movements in Europe from Orthodox Judaism to new spiritualities.
Publications include Interrogating Harmful Cultural Practices: Gender, Culture and Coercion, Routledge, 2015 (with T. Bradley); Féminisme et multiculturalisme. Les paradoxes du debat, Peter Lang, 2010 (with G. Coene) and various book chapters and articles in journals such as Citizenship Studies; Ethnicities; European Journal of Women’s Studies; Religion & Gender; Religions; Social Anthropology; Social Compass, Women’s Studies International Forum.
Dr Dawn Llewellyn, University of Chester
Llewellyn is Senior Lecturer in Christian Studies, in the Department of Theology and Religious Studies, at the University of Chester. She completed her MA in Women's Studies and her PhD in Religious Studies at Lancaster.
Her research is grounded in qualitative approaches to gender and contemporary Christianity, and focuses on women's religious reading practices, the relationship between feminism and religion, research methodologies, and motherhood, childlessness and Christianity. She is the author of Reading, Feminism, and Spirituality: Troubling the Waves (Palgrave, 2015); she has co-edited Religion, Equalities and Inequalities (with Sonya Sharma, Routledge 2016), and Reading Spiritualities (Ashgate 2008, with Deborah F. Sawyer); and her new book, Motherhood, Voluntary Childlessness and Christianity: Narratives of Choice, explores women's reproductive agency in Christian contexts (forthcoming, Bloomsbury). Dawn is also an editor for Bloomsbury's series Religion, Gender, and Sexuality, with Sian Hawthorne and Sonya Sharma.
Elisaveta Dvorakk, MA, Humboldt University of Berlin
Elisaveta Dvorakk is a PhD candidate in Art History and Visual Culture Studies at Humboldt University of Berlin. Her current work focuses on a postcolonial analysis of Journalistic Travel Photography from Northern Europe and Political Aesthetics of the Documentary in Switzerland and the Soviet Union in 1930s.
She holds a Masters Degree in Art History in Global Context with Focus on Europe and the Americas from Free University Berlin and a Bachelor Degree in Art History, Visual Culture Studies and Gender Studies from Humboldt University of Berlin. Elisaveta Dvorakk studied African Art History, Theory and History of Photography, Gender Studies and Theology in Berlin, Zurich and Vienna. Before, she studied Panel and Icon Painting in St. Petersburg, Bordeaux and Paris and received a Diploma in Panel Painting. She was a member of the V School for Arts and Humanities of the German National Academic Foundation within the research group “Bodies, Neurons, Media. Material Culture and Performance as a Research Base in Religious Aesthetics” in 2013-15.
Elisaveta Dvorakk is a scholarship holder of the German National Academic Foundation. She is a member of the German Art Historical Association and a board member of the International Association for the Study of Religion and Gender (IARG). Her research interests include Critical Theory of Photography; Gender, Postcolonial and Post-Secular Theory; Activisms; (Post-)Digital Archiving e.g. the Hashem el Madani Collection of the Arab Image Foundation (AIF) in Beirut, Lebanon.
email: elisaveta.dvorakk@hu-berlin.de
phone: +49 30 482728901
Clara Marlijn Meijer, MA, Åbo Akademi University
Clara Marlijn Meijer is a PhD Candidate in Comparative Religion at Åbo Akademi University in Finland. Her study is part of the Doctoral Training Network for Minority Research at Åbo Akademi University and the international research project ‘Young Adults and Religion in a Global Perspective‘ led by professor Peter Nynäs.
Her study explores religious, gendered and sexual identities among young adults who identify as sexual minorities in Accra, Ghana. Her interests range from concepts and theories from the field of comparative religion, gender studies to social psychology including intersectionality, agency, lived religion and identity strategies and emphasizing everyday life, complexity and fluidity.
Meijer holds a research master degree in gender studies and has a bachelor in journalism. Over the years, she has lived and worked in different national contexts as a journalist. Currently, besides working on her thesis, she teaches the graduate courses ‘Social exclusion and religion’ and ‘Religion and gender’ at Åbo Akademi University in Turku, Finland.
email: mmeijer@abo.fi
twitter: @marlijnmeijer