Hamza Esmili
Postdoctoral Researcher
I was trained as an anthropologist of religions at École normale supérieure de Paris and the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences (EHESS). I defended my PhD at the latter (2021). Since then, I have been a postdoctoral researcher at the Social and Cultural Anthropology Department of the KU Leuven. I was also a visiting researcher at the Department of Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley (2019).
My work revolves around the themes of persecution, hope, and the feeling of history amongst marginalized communities. I am especially interested in how historical consciousness comes to interplay with religious experience within Muslim societies.
I have conducted long-term fieldwork in Morocco, France, Belgium, the Syrian-Turkish border, and Iraq. In addition to being fluent in Arabic, English and French, I am learning Tamazight and Biblical Hebrew.
My scholarship has appeared (or is about to appear) in journals such as the Journal des anthropologues, Raisons politiques, Tumultes, Multitudes, Islamophobia Studies Journal, Hau : Journal of Ethnographic theory, Archives de sciences sociales des religions, Ethnologie française, Contemporary French and Francophone Studies, Ethnic and Racial Studies, as well as in various edited volumes.
I will be publishing two books in the next few months. The first, at Éditions du Seuil, is a revised version of my dissertation manuscript. The second, at Éditions Amsterdam, reflects the French public debate around the 'Muslim question'.
