Nilüfer Göle

Nilüfer Göle is Professor of Sociology at Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales and 2014/15 Mercator-IPC Senior Fellow. She previously taught at Boğaziçi University in Istanbul and has been invited as a visiting scholar in several universities such as MIT, Massachusetts and New School, New York. She is also a member of scientific council at IISMM, Institut d’études de l’Islam et des sociétés du monde musulman.

Her research themes include Islam, public sphere, gender, secularism and multiple modernities. Her work focuses on the ways Islam becomes visible in European public spheres and engenders a series of debates on religious and cultural difference. Her sociological approach aims to open up a new reading of modernity from a non-western perspective that in turn produces a broader critique of Eurocentrism in the definitions of secular modernity.

Her pioneer work on the contemporary significations of Islamic headscarf, The Forbidden Modern: Veiling and Civilization (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996) is published in Turkish, French, German and Spanish. She studied the emergence of Islam in different publics from a comparative perspective in Islam in public: Turkey, Iran and Europe(with Ludwig Ammann eds., Istanbul: Bilgi University Press, 2006; in German 2004). She explores the way Islam has become a master symbol of difference in Europe in her recent publications: Interpénétrations, L’islam et l’Europe (Paris: Galaade, 2005) and Islam in Europe: The Lure of Fundamentalism and the Allure of Cosmopolitanism (Princeton: Marcus Weiner, 2010). In 2013, she has completed a European scale research project entitled “Islam in the Making of a European Public Sphere”, EuroPublicIslam, awarded and funded by the European Research Council Advanced Grant. She has edited a book on Islam and public controversies in Europe, forthcoming in Ashgate publications.