Gulnaz Sibgatullina is an Assistant Professor for Illiberal Regimes in the European Studies capacity group. She is part of the Amsterdam School for Regional, Transnational, and European Studies (ARTES) at the UvA and a visiting researcher at the Institute for European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies (IERES) at George Washington University. Her research interests focus on the history and presence of Islam in Europe, sociology of religion and religious language, and postcolonial (translation) studies.

Her ongoing research project, funded by a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Action Fellowship, brings into the spotlight a broad international network of European converts to Islam that so far has been largely marginalised in both academic and social debates on the role of religion in Europe. Drawing on a wealth of literary works produced by the network members, the project investigates how and why those identifying themselves as white Europeans opt for Islam.

In 2019-21, Gulnaz Sibgatullina was a member of the ERC “The European Qur’an. Islamic Scripture in European Culture and Religion 1150-1850 (EuQu)” synergy team. Her personal project examined the politics of the Qur’an translation into Russian and Tatar. In 2014-19, she worked on her doctoral thesis as part of the research group “The Russian language of Islam” led by Prof. Michael Kemper and Prof. Jos Schaeken and funded by The Dutch Research Council (NWO).

Gulnaz Sibgatullina was a visiting scholar at the Goethe University (Germany), the University of Edinburgh (UK), and the University of Illinois in Champaign-Urbana (USA). In the past, she held the position of Lecturer and Researcher in the department of Russian and Eurasian Studies at Leiden University (the Netherlands), where her research and teaching focused primarily on the sociolinguistics of the Russian language and Christian-Muslim relations in post-Soviet Russia. 

She holds a Ph.D. from Leiden University (2019) and a Master's degree from Moscow State Linguistic University (2014).

Book

Sibgatullina, G. (2020). Languages of Islam and Christianity in Post-Soviet Russia. Brill Rodopi. Can be ordered here.

Articles

Sibgatullina, G. (forthcoming). The Muftis and the Myths: Constructing the Russian “Church for Islam”. Journal of Religion in Europe

Kemper, M., & Sibgatullina, G. (2021). Liberal Islamic Theology in Conservative Russia: Taufik Ibragim’s “Qurʾānic Humanism”. Die Welt des Islams.  https://doi.org/10.1163/15700607-61020002

Sibgatullina, G. (2019). Translating Islam into the language of the Russian state and the Orthodox Church. Religion, State & Society, 47(2), 234-247. https://doi.org/10.1080/09637494.2018.1562775

Book chapters

Sibgatullina, G. (Forthcoming). Translation as a Tool of Narrative Identity Construction: Language Strategies of Russian Converts to Islam”. In Routledge Handbook of Translation and Religion, H. Israel (ed.). Routledge.

Sibgatullina, G. (2021). Islam in Russia in the 1990s. In The 90s: A History of the Great Turn: Volume 6. The Public Sphere and Intellectual Life, Il’ia Kukulin (ed.) (in Russian). Pre-print https://history90.ru/texts/authors/sibgatullina-gulnaz/?sphrase_id=70 

Contributor to Raam op Rusland (in Dutch)

Author and host of the ACES Cast: Listen on Spotify and Apple