Welcome to this website. I am a Dutch lecturer scholar in the field of religious studies and gender studies. I currently combine two part-time jobs: As a lecturer in the bachelor program of religious studies at the University of Amsterdam; and as a postdoctoral researcher at the Faculty of Religion and Theology at the VU University Amsterdam. Here I work in the VIDI project ‘Unequal Partners? An Ethnographic Study of Christian-Jewish and Christian-Muslim Couples in the Netherlands’.

After completing the researchmaster in gender and ethnicity (UU) and a bachelor in cultural anthropology, I was employed as a PhD candidate at the department of philosophy and religious studies at Utrecht University until August 2021. Here I worked on a project about women’s conversion narratives: “Beyond ‘Religion versus Emancipation‘: Gender and Sexuality in Women’s Conversions to Judaism, Christianity and Islam in Contemporary Western Europe. My PhD research applies qualitative research methods to comparatively study women’s conversions to Judaism, Pentecostalism and Islam in the Netherlands. This project is connected to Ghent University in a joint doctorate.

Theoretically, I am interested in comparative religious studies, Jewish studies, cultural anthropology, gender studies, and the study of the secular. This is reflected in the topics of my research: I have written about women’s religiosity; sexuality and religious/secular discourses; Jewish women’s use of the tallit; LGBTQI+ and women’s rights and emancipation in the Netherlands; the position of LGBTQI+ people in Dutch Protestant communities; queer studies in/and religion; and transgender imagery in Christian traditions. In the past, I have collaborated with the NWO research project ‘Contested Privates. The Oppositional Pairing of Religion and Homosexuality in Contemporary Public Discourse in the Netherlands.’ Over all, intersections of religion and gender/sexuality shape my research in content as well as in theory. Being a trained cultural anthropologist, the focus is on personal narratives and experiences as connected to broader political and academic discourses. This interdisciplinary approach is reflected through out my research and publications.