Alumnus Dr A. Sophie Lauwers will be starting as postdoctoral fellow at the University of Edinburgh on October 1st. She received the IASH-Alwaleed postdoctoral fellowship for 2025-2026, and will be joining the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities with a project titled ‘Islam, National Identity and the State: Rethinking the Politics of Recognition.’
The project will investigate debates around extending public state recognition to religious minorities, focusing primarily on Islam in Western Europe. Sophie’s research more broadly aims to bring together insights from critical secularism studies and normative political theory, and has been published in journals such as Ethnic and Racial Studies, Ethnicities and Critical Philosophy of Race. She has also taught a wide range of courses, including in introductory ethics, political philosophy, recognition theory, and race, religion, and secularism.
Previously, Sophie was a postdoctoral researcher at KU Leuven in Belgium, where she worked on religion, epistemic justice and recognition in a dual affiliation with the Institute of Philosophy and the Faculty of Theology and Religious Studies.
She completed her PhD in Philosophy at the University of Aberdeen in 2023, as part of the Marie Skłodowska-Curie POLITICO project. Her thesis investigated how current models of political secularism contribute to secular and Christian hegemony in contemporary Europe. Based on this research, she is now writing a monograph on political secularism and hegemony.
Here, you can find her work on ethnicization and religious heritage, Christian privilege, and Islamophobia as a form of racism.