Lisa Maria Franke is research professor in Islamic Studies at Ghent University in the Department of Languages and Cultures. Her research and teaching focus on the social and intellectual history of Islam and being Muslim in the modern Middle East.
Before joining Ghent University in 2023, she worked as assistant professor at the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology, University of Göttingen on individual religiosities and non-conformist perspectives in Alexandria as part of the ERC Advanced Grant "Private Pieties". She received her PhD in Arabic Studies in 2011 from the University of Leipzig. In this project, she conducted research on martyrdom, gender constructions and social discourses in Palestine. Subsequently, at the University of Cologne, she studied colloquial poetry and the religious, social and political content negotiated therein in the course of the Egyptian revolution of 2011, as well as meaningful symbolism in modern interpretations of the afterlife. In 2022, she held the professorship (interim) for Islamic Studies (Arabic) at Heidelberg University.
Her research interests include everyday history, eschatology, faith and identity, discourse analysis and gender studies; individuality, religious transformation processes and social dynamics; modern Arabic literature; language as a form of mediation in various text forms.
She is the representative of CESSMIR, UGhent's Center for the Social Study of Migration and Refugees, at the Faculty of Arts and Philosophy.
In September 2025 she was awarded an ERC-Starting Grant for her project HAIR: Identity, Beauty, and the Self in Muslim Contexts: Emotional Landscapes and Changing Femininities Beyond the Veil
HAIR offers a compelling new perspective on the everyday politics of beauty, religion, and identity by placing the under-researched topic of Muslim women’s head hair - rather than the headscarf - at the center of analysis. Focusing on Egypt, Lebanon, and the United Arab Emirates, the Starting Grant HAIR explores how women feel and express themselves about their bodies as they navigate changing socio-religious expectations.
What makes HAIR unique is its interdisciplinary and innovative blended methodology. The project brings together Islamic studies, social anthropology, and the anthropology of emotions to explore the plurality of beauty practices in relation to understandings of religiosity and identity. It combines fieldwork, digital ethnography, and literary analysis to comparatively examine how women experience, share and talk about their intimate selves – both online and offline.
By foregrounding gendered body politics and the emotional and cultural dimensions of beauty, HAIR challenges dominant narratives and offers new ways of understanding rapidly changing societies. It opens up fresh perspectives on the entanglements of the body, beauty, and belief in diverse Muslim contexts. The project will produce scholarly publications and an online exhibition that rethink how concepts of gendered beauty and religious lifeworlds are constructed and re-imagined in globalised contexts.
https://www.ugent.be/en/news-events/ercstgr2025winners.htm
Thematic Foci
Arabic Studies/Islamic Studies/Anthropology: Cultures and societies of the modern and contemporary Arab-Islamic world (North Africa, Near and Middle East)
alternative (non-)religious movements and transformations of religious ideas; religious conflicts; religious-dynamic developments in Egypt; history of Palestine; (religious) education: Knowledge spaces and knowledge orders; processes of secularism and modernisation; martyrdom in Islam: paradise and ideas of paradise (eschatology); Sufi brotherhoods; Islamism; gender studies: gender and gender constructions, gendered space; concepts and ideas of space and spatial configurations; iconographic representations; oral and visual memory; oral history; resistance and agency; discourse analysis.
Regional Foci
North Africa, Near and Middle East esp. Egypt, Tunisia, Morocco, Sudan, Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Oman, the UAE
Recent publication:
Föllmer, Katja, Franke, Lisa Maria and Ben Amara, Ramzi. Rethinking the Anthropology of Islam: Dynamics of Change in Muslim Societies. In Honour of Roman Loimeier, Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter, 2024. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111341651
The contributions of this volume discuss the broad field of transformation processes in Muslim societies from different perspectives with various disciplinary approaches. Apart from methodological questions the authors investigate religious and social developments in Africa and the Near and Middle East while focusing e.g. on the production of meaning, negotiation of religious values and spaces, gendered agency, and debates of identity.
