Team
Serena Tolino
Serena Tolino is Professor of Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies and a co-director of the Department of Social Anthropology and Cultural Studies (SACS) at the University of Bern, where she also co-leads the Middle East and Muslim Societies (MOMuG) area. She is the PI of the project TraSIS: Trajectories of Slavery in Islamicate Societies. Three Concepts from Islamic Legal Sources, financed by the Swiss National Science Foundation. In the project, her research focuses on the concept of the umm al-walad.
Laura Emunds
Laura Emunds is a PhD student based at the University of Bern. She obtained her MA in Islamic Studies from Hamburg University in 2020. Within the framework of TraSIS, her work package centers the kitāba (or: mukātaba), a contract between an owner and his or her slave stipulating that the latter will obtain freedom after the fulfilment of certain contractual obligations. She aims to combine social and legal history in her research.
Laura Rowitz
Laura Rowitz is a doctoral researcher at University of Bern. She received a master’s degree in Islamic Studies from Hamburg University in 2018 and worked as a research assistant in Hamburg and Bern. Her current research centres on the concept of the kafāla in a legal historical perspective. Her PhD project examines both classical and modern legal discourses on the guarantee in Islamic law. Her research also explores jurists’ interpretations of the kafāla in contemporary Middle Eastern states as an instrument for labor migration control and child tutelage.
Omar Anchassi
Omar Anchassi is a Postdoctoral researcher at the University of Bern. He was previously an Early Career Fellow in Islamic Studies at the University of Edinburgh, and a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Exeter and at the KFCRIS in Riyadh. His contribution to TraSIS focuses on the historical development of the legal categories of the umm al-walad, the mukātaba and kafāla in non-Sunni juristic thought.