Gulnaz Sibgatullina is an Assistant Professor for Illiberal Regimes in the Department of History, European Studies, and Religious Studies. Her research focuses on Islam in Europe, contemporary Islamic thought, state-church relations, and minority issues in Russia. In addition to these areas of expertise, she also has a keen interest in cultural illiberalism, sociology of religion and religious language, as well as translation studies.

At the UvA, she is part of the Amsterdam School for Regional, Transnational, and European Studies (ARTES) and the Amsterdam Centre for European Studies (ACES). 

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 George Washington University (USA), 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 PhD from Leiden University (2019) and a Master's degree from Moscow State Linguistic University (2014).

Member of the Illiberalism Studies Program team

Contributor to Russia.post

Contributor to Raam op Rusland (in Dutch)

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