Ali A. Mazrui Senior Fellow
Jeanette S. Jouili is an Associate Professor of Religion at Syracuse University. As an anthropologist of religion, she is interested in the intersections among contemporary expressions of Islamic practice, secular governance, and processes of racialization, particularly within the political context of the Global War on Terror.
Over the past twenty years, Jouili has conducted ethnographic research among different Muslim communities in France, Germany, and the United Kingdom. She has published articles in several peer-reviewed journals, including Comparative Studies in Society and History, Anthropological Quarterly, Feminist Review, and French Politics, Culture & Society. She is the author of Pious Practice and Secular Constraints: Women in the Islamic Revival in Europe (Stanford University Press, 2015) and co-editor of Embodying Black Religion in Africa and Its Diasporas: Memory, Movement, and Belonging Through the Body (Duke University Press, 2021).
As a 2023 Ali A. Mazrui Senior Fellow in Global African Studies at The Africa Institute (GSU), Jouili worked toward completing a book manuscript exploring a British Muslim popular culture scene led by Afro-diasporic Muslims. The project examines this cultural scene within a context in which Muslim youth cultures have become sites of intervention for various security-oriented government policies.
During her fellowship, Jouili also began work on a new ethnographic study of Zitouna University, the historic institution of Islamic higher learning in Tunisia that attracts local and international students, particularly from West Africa. The project explores the country’s complex and deep-rooted secular-religious divisions and the socioeconomic and epistemological inequalities they obscure. It also considers how class, race, and gender animate, reconfigure, undo, or reinforce these divisions.
