Sophie Moser

Study of Religions with special focus: Islam

Institute of Cultural Studies

Tel.: +49 89 6004-4603

Sophie Moser studied Islamic Studies, Interdisciplinary Anthropology and Musicology at the University of Freiburg. During her studies, she focused on the regional areas of Iran and Turkey. From 2020 to 2025, she was a doctoral candidate and assistant at the Department of Near and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Basel in the Swiss National Science Foundation-funded project ‘Kerbela at the Bosporus: Negotiation Processes of Religious Identity among Shiite Communities in Istanbul’. She completed her doctorate in December 2024. In her dissertation, she examined the negotiation of identities using anthropological approaches based on the ritual practices of various Shiite communities regarding ʿĀshūrāʾ from the 1980s to the early 2020s. Her dissertation is expected to be published in 2026 by De Gruyter Brill in the series ‘Anthropology of Islam.’

In her postdoctoral project, she examines melodised elegies by Shiite and Alevi women and demonstrates, based on these contemporary female-led discourses and soundscapes, how women use poetry and performance to negotiate memory, gender roles and authority.

Research interests

Shi’ite Islam
Religious minority issues in Turkey
Gender-specific discourses
Culture and spaces of remembrance
Islamic rituals
Ethnographic research in Turkey and Iran