Dr J. Al Korani (Joud)

Holding an MA and PhD from the University of Toronto, Joud Alkorani is an anthropologist with a background in Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies. Joud's research explores how migrants’ everyday lives and religious practices take shape in the aftermath of the Arab Spring. Her research and teaching engage themes like migration and transnationalism; statehood and governmentality; relationality and subjectivity; and lived theology.

Joud's first project was an ethnography of Islam in the Arabian Gulf. Through fieldwork and interviews with middle-class, migrant women living in Dubai, Joud examined how Muslims grapple with Islamic ethical practices, theological commitments, and eschatological horizons in ways marked by the contingencies of their living and laboring in Dubai as noncitizens and a result of state efforts to depoliticize Islam. Joud is developing a book manuscript based on this research, which was awarded the 2022 Gwenn Okruhlik Dissertation Award by the Association for Gulf and Arabian Peninsula Studies.

In 2022, Joud completed a 6-month postdoctoral fellowship at the Orient-Institut Beirut. While there, she organized an international workshop entitled "Reckoning with God: Divine-Human Relations after the Arab Spring." Joud has co-edited (along with Amira Mittermaier) a special section on this topic for an upcoming issue of Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East. Her other publications explore migration as an intersubjective journey; marriage as community-crafting; and critical thinking as a means to piety.

Joud is currently investigating how food mediates divine-human relations within religiously and ethnically pluralistic communities. Her current research traces the diasporic Syrian foodways that have emerged since 2011 through a comparative analysis of restaurants, food stores, and home catering businesses located in Rotterdam, Dubai, and Mississauga. Together with Stefan Williamson Fa, she leads the Muslim Foodways Network.