Till Mostowlansky
Principal InvestigatorTill Mostowlansky is a Research Professor and Eccellenza Professorial Fellow in the Department of Anthropology and Sociology at the Geneva Graduate Institute. Before joining the Graduate Institute in 2018 he lectured at the University of Bern and The University of Hong Kong, and was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore, and at the Hong Kong Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences, The University of Hong Kong. He is the author of Azan on the Moon: Entangling Modernity along Tajikistan’s Pamir Highway (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2017) and co-editor of Infrastructure and the Remaking of Asia (University of Hawai’i Press, 2022).
Zarina Urmanbetova
Postdoctoral FellowZarina Urmanbetova is currently completing her PhD in Social Anthropology at the University of Fribourg in which she focuses on the social lives of roads in Central Asia. She holds an MA in Cultural Anthropology from Hacettepe University in Ankara and a BA in Media studies from the Kyrgyz-Turkish Manas University in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan. Prior to her doctoral studies, she worked on various research projects in Kyrgyzstan linked to her research interests, including the anthropology of infrastructure, feminism, post-socialist and post-Soviet communities, memory and nostalgia, beliefs and religious practices, and decolonial approaches.
Gulzhan Begeyeva
PhD candidateGulzhan Begeyeva holds an MA in International Studies from the University of Tsukuba in Japan and an MA in Politics and Security from the OSCE Academy in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan. In 2017 she was a visiting research fellow at the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs in Oslo where she completed her research on donor organizations in aid-dependent Kyrgyzstan. Her current research will be exploring networks of aid in Kazakhstan through the lens of Muslim humanitarianism.
Pol Llopart i Olivella
PhD candidatePol Llopart i Olivella holds an MSc in Social Anthropology from the University of Copenhagen and a BA in Social Anthropology from the University of Barcelona. His research interests include the intersection of economic anthropology and the anthropology of religion. In his BA thesis he studied the practice of Muslim almsgiving (zakat) and its re-configuration and re-signification in a Moroccan diasporic community in Catalonia. In his MA thesis he explores how modernist strands of Islam contest and reformulate Islamic sacred sites and traditions in Serbia.
Mukaram Toktogulova
Senior Research AssociateMukaram Toktogulova is an associate professor at the American University of Central Asia. Her research interests include Islam and traditional knowledge in Central Asia, language and culture, Kyrgyz Epic poems, and Kyrgyz Literature. Mukaram is the author of articles on Islam in Kyrgyzstan in which she discusses the localization of transnational Tablighi Jama’at networks in Kyrgyzstan, media representations of Islam, and syncretism of pre-Islamic and Islamic practices. She is the author of a monograph book about the Kyrgyz writer K. Jusubaliev and editor of the textbook Research Methods in Social Sciences (in Kyrgyz).
Fabio Vicini
Senior Research AssociateFabio Vicini is a Senior Researcher in Anthropology at the University of Verona. He focuses on the intersection of anthropology, Islamic studies and social theory and investigates how, over the past century, Muslims have rethought Islamic tradition through modernity as well as longstanding Islamic ideas of the self, discipline, connectivity, and transcendence. Fabio has worked with various academic institutions, including the School of Religious Studies, McGill University (2019-2020), Istanbul 29 Mayis University (2014-2020), the Berlin Graduate School Muslim Cultures and Societies and Zentrum Moderner Orient (2011). He is the author of Reading Islam: Life and Politics of Brotherhood in Modern Turkey (Brill, 2020) and co-editor of the Oxford Handbook of Religion in Turkey (OUP, forthcoming 2023).
Mohammad Javaid
Research AssistantMohammad Javaid is a master’s student in Anthropology and Sociology at the Geneva Graduate Institute. Prior to joining the Graduate Institute, he completed an interdisciplinary master’s in Society and Culture at the Indian Institute of Technology Gandhinagar, Gujarat, India. He holds a BA in Arabic studies from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India. Hailing from Kashmir, Javaid’s research has been inspired by personal experiences. It includes state violence, political conflict, the anthropology of Islam and mysticism.