Annelies Moors is an anthropologist and professor emerita at the University of Amsterdam. She studied Arabic in Syria, and has conducted extensive fieldwork in Palestine and the Netherlands. Focusing on the entanglements of nation, class, gender and religion, marriage and reproduction, materiality and affect, and visuality and embodiment she has written extensively on topics such as Muslim family law, Islamic marriage and non-marriage; Muslim cultural politics; Muslim dress, fashion and face-veiling; wearing gold; migrant domestic labor; the visual media (postcards of Palestine), and doing ethnography.
Between 2001 and 2008 she was the Amsterdam chair for ISIM (International Institute for the Study of Islam in the Modern World). She held an ERC advanced grant on Problematising Muslim marriages and was a fellow at NIAS (Netherlands Institute for Advanced Studies). Recently she published Muslim marriage and non-marriage: where religion and politics meet intimate life (Leuven University Press, 2023, co-edited with Julie McBrien). Her book on Doing ethnography: institutional surveillance and the struggle for epistemic diversity will be published in February 2026. See https://sites.google.com/site/anneliesmoors/
For a bit more historical detail: Annelies Moors held the chair for contemporary Muslim societies at the department of anthropology at the University of Amsterdam. From 2001-2008 she has been the Amsterdam chair of the International Institute for the Study of Islam in the Modern World. She has held visiting positions at the University of San’a, Yemen, and was Honorably Visiting Professor at the London School of Fashion (London University of the Arts). She was the primary investigator of an international NORFACE research program on The emergence of Islamic fashion in Europe, and of the NWO Cultural Dynamics program on Islamic cultural practices and performances: New youth cultures in Europe. Until early 2020 she was the primary investigator of the NWO program Muslim Activism in the Netherlands after 1989 (senior researcher: Martijn de Koning) and of the ERC advanced grant Problematizing "Muslim Marriages": Ambiguities and Contestations (for more information see http://religionresearch.org/musmar2014/). From September 2022 till February 2023 she was an individual fellow at NIAS for the project The Struggle for the Future of Ethnography .
Email: a.c.a.e.moors at uva.nl