Dr J. Al Korani (Joud)

Joud Alkorani is an anthropologist with a background in Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies. Joud joins Radboud from the University of Toronto, where she completed her MA and PhD. Broadly speaking, Joud's research explores how changing political, economic, and sociohistorical conditions transform Muslims’ beliefs and practices. In particular, she is interested in the forms Muslim piety takes after the Islamic Revival and the Arab Spring. Joud's research and teaching lie at the intersection of religion and gender, migration and transnationalism, and the modern Middle East.

Joud's first project was an ethnography of Muslim becoming, believing, and belonging in Dubai. Through fieldwork and interviews with middle-class, migrant Muslim women, Joud examined how Muslims grapple with Islamic ethical practices, theological commitments, and eschatological horizons in their everyday lives. She focused on how these women's endeavors are marked by the contingencies of their living and laboring in Dubai as noncitizens and shaped by 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, of the Max Weber Foundation. During her time there, Joud organized an international workshop entitled "Reckoning with God: Divine-Human Relations after the Arab Spring." She is currently co-editing (along with Amira Mittermaier) a special issue on this theme.