Welcome to the website of the research project “Beyond ‘Religion vs Emancipation’: Gender and Sexuality in Women’s Conversions to Judaism, Christianity, and Islam in Contemporary Western Europe”. 

This NWO-funded project is hosted by the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at Utrecht University and runs from 2016-2021. It is comprised of three multi-disciplinary sub-projects in the form of a PhD Research and two postdoctoral studies. 

The aim of the project is to study women’s conversion processes, in which gender and sexuality play a formative role and new religious subjectivities are acquired. While it is often assumed that religion and women’s emancipation are fundamentally conflicting, this project challenges that conception, and through a comparative research contributes to academic and public understandings of tensions between religious and secular gender discourses.

As this research project draws to a close, we are happy to welcome you to our fully online, virtual conference, taking place March 10-12 2021. Find the conference programme here.

Deadline registration: March 1, 2021.