Elisabeth Becker is Assistant Professor and Freigeist Fellow at the Max Weber Institute for Sociology at Heidelberg University. This fellowship provides generous research funding (1.4 million euros) and releases recipients from most academic duties—administration, teaching—to focus on a high-risk, boundary-pushing research project. Her project, “Invisible Architects: Muslims, Jews and the Construction of Europe,” moves Muslims and Jews from the periphery of the European story to its center, arguing that both groups have been overlooked as formative makers in European nation-state projects, and the European imaginary, more broadly. Through interviews with Jewish and Muslim leaders and archival research in France, Germany, and Spain conducted by Elisabeth and a team of researchers, she will write a socio-legal genealogy of Europe that places Muslims and Jews at its core. At the same time, she will curate a museum exhibition in conjunction with a leading museum curator and write for journalistic outlets on the contributions of Jews and Muslims to Europe present and past.
Elisabeth has published in such venues as: the Journal of European Sociology, Ethnic & Racial Studies, the Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Social Science & Medicine, the Journal of Islamic Architecture, and the Annual Review of the Sociology of Religion. She also very much identifies as a public scholar, and has written for leading publications like the Washington Post and the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.