An international research network exploring the representation of Muslim identities in contemporary cultural discourses.

Inderpal Grewal is Professor of Women's Studies at UC Irvine and the Director of the Phd Program in Culture and Theory. Her research interests include transnational feminist theory; gender and globalization, human rights; NGO's and theories of civil society; theories of travel and mobility; South Asian cultural studies, postcolonial feminism; and Victorian imperial culture. She is the author of Home and Harem: Nation, Gender, Empire and the Cultures of Travel (Duke, 1996) and Transnational America: Feminisms, Diasporas, Neoliberalisms (2005), and (with Caren Kaplan) has written and edited Gender in a Transnational World: Introduction to Women's Studies (2001) and Scattered Hegemonies: Postmodernity and Transnational Feminist Practices (1994). Currently she is working on a book length project on the relation between feminist practices and security discourses.

Reina Lewis is Artscom Centenary Professor in Fashion Studies, London College of Fashion, University of the Arts London. She is the author of 'Rethinking Orientalism: Women, Travel and the Ottoman Harem' (IB Tauris 2004), and 'Gendering Orientalism: Race, Femininity and Representation' (Routledge 1996). Her book series 'Cultures in Dialogue'reprints critical editions of women's travel writing and memoir from and about the Middle East (edited with Teresa Heffernan, Gorgias Press). She is co-editor, with Nancy MIcklewright, of 'Gender, Modernity, Liberty: Middle Eastern and Western Women's Writings' (IB Tauris, 2006), and, with Sara Mills, of 'Feminist Postcolonial Theory: A Reader' (EUP 2003).

Maleiha Malik (King’s College, University of London) qualified as a Barrister in 1991. She is a Lecturer in Law at the School of Law, King’s College. Her special research interests include jurisprudence (legal and political theory); UK and EC anti-discrimination law; legal issues and challenges relating to Islam and Muslims in Britain; and the place of Islam in the West. Her recent publications include: Racist Crime 1999 (MLR 62:3 May) 409; 'Faith and the State of Jurisprudence', in Faith and Law, Douglas Scott, Oliver and Tadros (eds.), Oxford 2000; 'Minority Protection and Human Rights' in Sceptical Essays on Human Rights, Campbell Ewing and Tomkins (eds.), Oxford 2001. She has also written on legal changes which would encourage the meaningful identification of minorities such as British Muslims with mainstream legal and political institutions.

Tariq Modood (University of Bristol) is Professor of Sociology, Politics and Public Policy, and Director of the University Centre for the Study of Ethnicity and Citizenship, University of Bristol. He is the Bristol Director of the Leverhulme Programme on Migration and Citizenship, with University College London, which consists of 8 projects running between 2003 and 2008. He is involved in projects on social capital and gender, national identity and religion, and higher education and globalization. He has written numerous articles and co-edited Multiculturalism, Muslims and Citizenship, Routledge, 2005, His recent single-authored Multiculturalism: A Civic Idea, Polity was published in May 2007. He is the Founding Editor of Ethnicities (Sage).

Annelies Moors holds the ISIM Chair at the University of Amsterdam, and directs the research programme on Muslim Cultural Politics. She is the author of Women, Property and Islam: Palestinian experiences 1920-1990 (Cambridge University Press, 1995), co-editor of Religion, Media and the Public Sphere (Indiana University Press, 2006), and co-editor (with Emma Tarlo) of Fashion Theory: Muslim Fashions Special Double Issue, volume 11, 2/3, 2007. She writes on Islam and gender, styles and convictions and public presence and visibility.

Elizabeth Poole is Senior Lecturer in Media Studies at Staffordshire University specialising in Muslim representation, race, new media and audiences. She has written widely in the area of Muslim representation and is the author of: Reporting Islam: Media Representations of British Muslims, I.B. Tauris, 2002; Muslims and the News Media, I.B. Tauris 2006 (with John Richardson).

Tariq Ramadan (St Antony’s College, Oxford University) was selected to a two-year research fellowship at the European Studies Centre and Middle East Centre in 2006, having been a Visiting Fellow in the academic year 2005-6. He was previously Professor of Islamology at the University of Freiburg, Switzerland. His research and teaching have focussed on Islamic philosophy and the possibility of reconciling Islam with the values, laws and institutions of contemporary Europe. This was the subject of his book, To be a European Muslim (Islamic Foundation, 2003). A frequent lecturer, he is a member of a task force appointed by the Prime Minister to look at the understanding of Islam in Britain, and of Britain among Muslims. His other publications include: slam, the West, and the Challenges of Modernity (Islamic Foundation, 2003), and Western Muslims and the Future of Islam (Oxford University Press, 2005).

Christoph Ramm is Research Associate in the Department of South East European History (Turkish-Ottoman History) at the Ruhr University Bochum. After graduating from the Department for Oriental Languages at the University of Bonn in 1999 he taught one year in the Department for Turkish-German Translation at the University of Mersin, Turkey, and several years in bilingual Turkish-German classes at a college in Cologne. He has published on Turkey and the EU, the Cyprus conflict, nationalism and identities in Turkey and Cyprus, and the Turkish-German community. Currently he is working in a project funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) on identity conceptions in the Turkish Cypriot community after 1974.

Ziauddin Sardar (Writer, broadcaster and cultural critic) is listed on Prospect Magazine’s ‘Britain’s Top 100 Public Intellectuals’. A Visiting Professor of Postcolonial Studies in the School of Arts, the City University, London, he is the author of over 40 books. These include The Future of Muslim Civilization (1979), Islamic Futures: the shape of ideas to come (1985), Postmodernism and the Other (1998), and the international bestseller Why Do People Hate America? (2002). A collection of his writings is available as Islam, Postmodernism and Other Futures: a Ziauddin Sardar Reader (2003). His autobiography Desperately Seeking Paradise: journeys of a sceptical Muslim (2005) has received wide acclaim. He is the editor of the journals, Futures and Third Text, is a columnist for the New Statesman and is widely known for his radio and television appearances.

Emma Tarlo is Lecturer in Anthropology at Goldsmiths College, University of London. Her publications include Clothing Matters (University of Chicago Press, 1996) and Unsettling Memories (University of California Press, 2003). She is co-editor (with Annelies Moors) of Fashion Theory: Muslim Fashions Special Double Issue, volume 11, 2/3, 2007. Currently she is working on a book entitled Visibly Muslim: Dress Identity and Islam, based on her most recent research amongst Muslims in Britain (Berg forthcoming).