Notes on the Contributors

Schirin Amir-Moazami holds a PhD from the Department of Social and Political Sciences at the European University Institute in Florence. Since 2009, she has held the position of Assistant Professor for Islam in Europe at the Department of Islamic Studies at the Freie Universität, Berlin. She has published a book on headscarf controversies in France and Germany under the title Politisierte Religion. Der Kopftuchstreit in Deutschland und Frankreich, and has also published numerous articles on issues concerning Muslims in secular European countries. In her current research, she focuses on the processes of governmentalization of Islam in Germany. Her research interests include Islamic movements in Europe, political theory, feminist theory and the sociology of religion.

Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi is Professor of Comparative Literature at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and has taught at Dartmouth College, Princeton University, Yale University, Duke University and the University of Michigan. She is the author of By Words Alone: The Holocaust in Literature (1980), which was shortlisted for the National Jewish Book Award; and Booking Passage: Exile and Homecoming in the Modern Jewish Imagination (2000), which was shortlisted for the Koret Book Award. She has written on subjects ranging from representations of the Shoah in postwar American, Israeli and European culture, to the portrayal of exile and homecoming in contemporary Jewish literature. In 2007 she became a Guggenheim Fellow for her current project entitled “Jerusalem and the Poetics of Return”. She divides her time between Jerusalem (Israel) and Wilmot (New Hampshire).

Volkhard Krech studied Protestant theology, comparative religion, sociology, and philosophy at the Universities of Heidelberg and Bielefeld. He currently holds the positions of Professor of Religious Studies, speaker of the Research Department Center for Religious Studies (CERES) and director of the Käte Hamburger Kolleg “Dynamics in the History of Religions” at Bochum University. His research interests include the theory of religion and history of religions, religious pluralization and globalization, religion and violence, and religion and the arts, as well as the history of Religious Studies. His latest book, Wo bleibt die Religion? Zur Ambivalenz des Religiösen in der modernen Gesellschaft, was published by Transcript (2011).

Joachim Küpper is Professor of Romance Philology and Comparative Literature. He is the director of the Dahlem Humanities Center at Freie Universität Berlin. He was granted the Gottfried-Wilhelm-Leibniz Award of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft in 2001. In 2009 he received an Advanced Grant from the European Research Council. He is a member of Leo-poldina /German National Academy of Sciences and a corresponding member of the Goettingen Academy of Sciences. His research focus is the theory of literature and arts, as well as intellectual history. His publications in the field include: “Teleologischer Universalismus und kommunitaristische Differenz. Überlegungen zu Calderóns La aurora en Copacabana, zu Voltaires Alzire, ou les Américains, zu Sepúlveda und zu Las Casas” (1996); “The Traditional Cosmos and the New World” (2003); “Philology and Theology in Petrarch” (2007); “Ei(aa)roneia: The Politics of Religion in the Cantar de mío Cid” (2011); “Christentum, Judentum, Islam – Säkulare Welt und Geschichtlichkeit” (2013).

Paula Montero is Professor at the University of São Paulo/Brazil, as well as the President of the Brazilian Center of Analysis and Planning (CEBRAP). After completing a PhD in Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of São Paulo, she was invited to Columbia University (1984) as Visiting Scholar at the Institute of Latin American Studies, and to the University of Chicago (1996) as a Tinker Visiting Professor. Since 1983, she has been researching popular religions in Brazil. Her anthropological studies have focused on Afro-American traditions, in particular healing practices, witchcraft and possession. In recent years, she has focused on issues of intercultural relations and multiculturalism; her latest work is about Christian missions among the Amazonian Indians. At present she is studying new forms of religious organizations and their activities in the modern public sphere.

Chakravarthi Ram-Prasad studied history, politics and sociology in India before taking a doctorate in philosophy at Oxford University. Prior to joining the faculty at Lancaster University, he held research fellowships at Oxford and Cambridge, and also taught at the National University of Singapore. He has written several books on comparative philosophy, including Knowledge and Liberation in Classical Indian Thought (2001), Eastern Philosophy (2005) and Indian Philosophy and the Consequences of Knowledge (2007), as well as papers on a variety of topics, including epistemology, ethics, comparative theology, religion and politics, and intercultural relations. He has done research on religion and immigration for the British Home Office, and has also conducted other research projects, including work on religion and cultural values in the Indian IT industry. He was PI on a major research project funded by the British Arts and Humanities Research Council on comparative philosophies of the self. In addition, he is currently involved with the Dalai Lama’s Mind Life Institute on neuroscience and the contemplative traditions, and has recently worked with the Archbishop of Canterbury on Hindu-Christian social relations and comparative theology.

Martin Riesebrodt is Professor Emeritus of Sociology at the University of Chicago, where he held a joint appointment at the Department of Sociology and the Divinity School. He presently holds the Yves Oltramore Chair on “Religion and Politics in the Contemporary World” at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva. His main academic interests are the historical and comparative sociology of religion, and classical social theory, especially the work of Max Weber. His major publications include: The Promise of Salvation: A Theory of Religion (2010); Die Rückkehr der Religionen. Fundamentalismus und der ‘Kampf der Kulturen’ (2000); Pious Passion: The Emergence of Fundamentalism in the United States and Iran (1993).

Asonzeh Ukah was affiliated with the University of Bayreuth, Germany, from 2000 to 2013, when he joined the University of Cape Town, South Africa. He studied comparative religious studies at the University of Ibadan, Nigeria, and graduated with a First Class Honours degree in 1994. He obtained an MA in sociology of religion in 1997 and an M.Sc in sociology in 1999 from the same university. He obtained a PhD in the history of religions from the University of Bayreuth, Germany in 2004. He is the author of A New Paradigm of Pentecostal Power (2008). His articles, which focus on African pentecostalism, and on religious advertising and popular culture, have been published internationally in English, German and Spanish. Since 2007 his research focus has been migrant religions in South Africa; he was a research member of a University of Bayreuth-based project, funded by the DFG, entitled “Tradition and Innovation: Old and New Churches in the Religious Market of South Africa” (2008–2010), which was an offshoot of an ongoing project on “The Economy of Sacred Space in Durban, South Africa” (2011).