Dionigi Albera
Co-Director
DIONIGI ALBERA is an anthropologist and senior research fellow at the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS). He is based at the IDEMEC (Institute of European, Mediterranean and Comparative Ethnology, Aix-Marseille University), which he has directed from 2006 to 2016. His research has focused on Europe and the Mediterranean, and his interests include migration, kinship and domestic organization, pilgrimage and interfaith mixing.
Since the early 2000, he has worked - with articles, international research programs, books and conferences - to foster comparative academic study of the sharing of sacred places between faithful of different religions in the Mediterranean region. A book he edited (with Maria Couroucli) on this topic was first published in French (Religions traversées, Arles, Actes Sud 2009), and then translated into Spanish, Italian and English (Sharing sacred spaces in the Mediterranean. Christians, Muslims and Jews at Shrines and Sanctuaries, Indiana University Press, 2012).
He is one of the curators of the touring exhibition on Shared Sacred Sitesheld at the Museum of Mediterranean and European Civilizations in Marseille (Mucem, 2015), the Bardo Museum in Tunis (2016), the Macedonian Museum of Contemporary Art and the National Museum of Photography in Thessaloniki (2017), the National Museum of the History of Immigration in Paris (2017-2018), the Museum of Confluences-Dar el-Bacha in Marrakesh (2018), the New York Public Library, the Morgan Library and Museum, and the James Gallery (CUNY) in New York (2018), Depo in Istanbul (2019), and CerModern in Ankara (2021).
Karen Barkey
Co-Director
KAREN BARKEY is Charles Theodore Kellogg and Bertie K. Hawver Kellogg Chair of Sociology and Religion at Bard College and OSUN (Open Society University Network).
Barkey has written on the early centuries of Ottoman state toleration of religious groups and she is now working on how religious coexistence, toleration and sharing occurred in different historical sites under Ottoman rule. She explores religious toleration as a state based response to diversity in empires and tolerance and sharing of sacred space as social, community based solutions to diversity that evolve under the aegis of the state, yet at the level of the local relations across communities marked by difference. Her edited book, Choreography of Sacred Spaces: State, Religion and Conflict Resolution (with Elazar Barkan), explores the history of shared religious spaces in the Balkans, Anatolia and Palestine/Israel, all three regions once under Ottoman rule. The project provides the historical antecedents to help us understand the accommodation and contention around specific sites in the modern period, tracing comparatively areas and regime changes. Barkey is now writing a book length manuscript on the emergence of shared sites and their transformation over time.
She is also one of the curators of the international exhibition on Shared Sacred Sites held at the Macedonian Museum of Contemporary Art, the National Museum of Photography, and Yeni Cami in Thessaloniki (2017), the New York Public Library, the Morgan Library and Museum, and the James Gallery (CUNY) in New York (2018).
Personal website: karenbarkey.com
Leadership Team
Manoël Pénicaud
Co-Director
Manoël Pénicaud is an anthropologist and a research fellow at the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS). He is a member of the Institute of European Mediterranean and Comparative Ethnology (IDEMEC, CNRS, Aix-Marseille University). He is a specialist in religious and pilgrimage studies, shared holy places, interreligious relations in the Mediterranean, visual anthropology and museology.
His books include Louis Massignon: Le “catholique musulman” (Bayard, 2020, Lyautey prize 2021 and jury prize of the Oeuvre d'Orient 2021); Shared Sacred Sites (coedited with D. Albera and K. Barkey, The New York Public Library, 2018); Shared Sacred Sites in the Balkans and the Mediterranean (co-edited with D. Albera, K. Barkey, D. Papadopoulos, Macedonian Museum of Contemporary Art, 2018); Coexistences (co-edited with D. Albera Actes Sud, 2017); Lieux saints partagés (co-edited with D. Albera and I. Marquette, Actes Sud, 2015, Mediterranean Art Book Prize); Le réveil des Sept Dormants (Cerf, 2016); Dans la peau d’un autre (Presses de la Renaissance, 2007). On the topic of shared sanctuaries, he wrote many articles or chapters, and he co-edited the special issue “Holy Sites in the Mediterranean, Sharing and Division” (Religiographies, vol 1, 1, 2022). He is one of the curators of the international touring exhibition Shared Sacred Sites (“Lieux saints partagés”) held at the Museum of Mediterranean and European Civilizations in Marseille (Mucem, 2015), the Bardo Museum in Tunis (2016), the Macedonian Museum of Contemporary Art and the Museum of Photography in Thessaloniki (2017), the National Museum of the History of Immigration in Paris (2017-2018), the Museum of Confluences-Dar el-Bacha in Marrakesh (2018), Depo in Istanbul (2019), CerModern in Ankara (2021), and at the Ecole Française de Rome (2022).
He is also a documentary filmmaker, and a photographer represented by Le Pictorium Agency.
Anna Bigelow
Co-Director
Anna Bigelow is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Stanford University. Her research on shared sacred spaces was sparked by being in India at the time of the 1992 destruction of the Babri Masjid.
In particular, she is interested in sites that are shared by Muslims and non-Muslims in ways that contribute to and reflect community resilience and creative collective life. Her first book Sharing the Sacred: Practising Pluralism in Muslim North India (Oxford 2010) is a study of a Muslim majority community in Indian Punjab and the shared sacred and civic spaces in that community.
Bigelow's current book project, tentatively titled Sacred Space and the Secular State: Belonging and Unbelonging in India and Turkey (under contract with Princeton University Press), is a comparative study of shared sacred sites in India and Turkey, exploring how everyday devotional life in shared spaces illuminates the shifting terrain of these ambivalently secular states. Another project traces the lives of devotional objects circulated by Muslims, Hindus, and others around a Sufi tomb shrine in India. She is editor and contributor to a volume on material objects in Islamic cultures, Islam through Objects (Bloomsbury, 2021).
Research Associates
Shannon Massey Gifford
Research Associate
Shannon is currently pursuing her BA in history at Stanford University with minors in creative writing and archaeology. She is interested in applying these various modes of storytelling to public education. She has explored these mediums through the Shared Sacred Sites project and other research, including local case studies on Washington state history and its representation in school curriculum and interpretive trail signs, investigations of mythologies and associated objects in the Ottoman empire, and two fantasy novel manuscripts inspired by the themes and conflicts of the early modern world.
jem Jebbia
Research Associate
jem Jebbia is a PhD Candidate in Religious Studies at Stanford University. In her studies, jem focuses on race and immigration, interfaith communities, and material religion in California. Her dissertation focuses on community building across religious and racial lines in contemporary California. Other projects include an
ethnographic study of the #TacoTrucksatEveryMosque Movement, the religious history of the "Happiest Place on Earth," and a pop-up exhibit called Golden State Sacred, depicting the religious history of California. At Stanford, jem has taught courses on early Christianity, religion and material culture, social engagement and justice, and is currently developing a course on religion in contemporary California. In her previous position, jem served as a dialogue facilitator and workshop developer for interfaith engagement and student leadership.