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Jouili is an Associate Professor of Religion at Syracuse University. As an anthropologist of religion, she is interested in the intersections between contemporary expressions of Islamic practice, secular governance, and processes of racialization, especially in a political context defined by the Global War on Terror.
Over the past twenty years, she has conducted ethnographic research in France, Germany and the UK among different Muslim communities. She has published articles in various peer-reviewed journals, such as Comparative Studies in Society and History, Anthropological Quarterly, Feminist Review, or French Politics, Culture & Society. She is the author of Pious Practice and Secular Constraints: Women in the Islamic Revival in Europe (Stanford, 2015) and co-editor of the volume “Embodying Black Religion in Africa and its Diasporas: Memory, Movement and Belonging through the Body,” (Duke 2021). During her time in Sharjah, she will complete a book manuscript that explores a British Muslim popular culture scene spearheaded by Afro-Diasporic Muslims, in a context where Muslim youth cultures have become sites of intervention for various security-oriented government policies.
Furthermore, Jouili will begin to work on a new project, an ethnographic study of the Zitouna University, the historical institution of Islamic higher learning in Tunisia that attracts local students as well as international students, especially from West Africa. In this project, she seeks to explore the complex and deep-seated secular-religious divisions in the country, as well as the socio-economic and epistemological inequalities that these divisions obscure, while paying attention to how questions around class, race, and gender give life to, reconfigure, undo, or reinforce these divisions.
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