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The Irish Centre for Human Rights, School of Law, University of Galway, is pleased to offer one doctoral scholarship in the field of Islamic Law and Gender. Additional information about the research area can be found below. The selected candidate will be supervised by Professor Roja Fazaeli and supported by a Graduate Research Committee comprised of staff members from the Irish Centre for Human Rights at University of Galway.

Funding

The scholarship is tenable for a maximum of four years, renewable each year subject to satisfactory progress and recommendation by the Graduate Research Committee. It will cover full fees for the successful candidate, in addition to a stipend of €22,000 per annum.

Condition of Funding

It is anticipated that the successful candidate would be in a position to join the PhD Programme by September 2025.

The successful candidate must register on a full-time basis.

The Research Project

The candidate will work closely with the research team of the European Research Council funded project ‘Building Conceptual and Methodological Expertise for the Study of Gender, Agency and Authority in Islam (BILQIS)’

BILQIS emerges from a critical concern around Muslim women’s access to justice in Europe and is driven by methodological advances in feminism and is primarily distinguished by its systematic and rigorous inquiries into questions of gender in relation to Islamic family laws (IFL) and IFL-related socio-religious and socio-legal power structures. The project will engage in a comparative study of how Muslim women have navigated agency and authority over time from the long 19^th century to the present day across diverse European peripheries, specifically the Ottoman Balkans and the contemporary states of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Greece, Ireland, Norway, and Sweden.

The PhD researcher will work most closely with the Principle Investigator, Professor Roja Fazaeli, and a Postdoctoral fellow on BILQIS Work Package 3, which investigates Islamic family laws, Gender Equality, and Equal Access to Justice in the Norway, Sweden, and Ireland.

WP3 engages in socio-religious and socio-legal analysis driven by the question of what sources are used to justify authoritative standing in Norway, Sweden, and Ireland on Islamic family laws. As such it studies how these sources relate to women’s agentic equality, as well as to concepts of gender complementarity in Islamic legal thought. WP3 also seeks better to understand the outcomes of family law related court cases and informal community mediation structures in relation to Muslim women’s access to justice.

WP3 will employ comparative textual and contextual methodologies, as well as qualitative interview sets. The PhD researcher will work with the Postdoctoral fellow to conduct interviews with religious and civil activists and advocates for women’s rights, religious leaders, including muftis, civil society actors, academics, and legal and state actors. The successful candidate will be broadly familiar with the fields of gender studies and equality studies. The successful candidate will also be able to engage with Islamic legal discourses, Islamic family laws, and the national contexts of Norway, Sweden, and Ireland. They should also be able readily to employ relevant textual and qualitative research methodologies. Linguistic knowledge of Arabic or Persian or Norwegian or Swedish is additionally desirable.

As part of the scholarship award, recipients are required to seek external scholarship funding from the Irish Research Council (IRC) or other funding bodies, as instructed by their PhD supervisor. In the event that an external scholarship is granted, the scholarship funding under this award will be terminated starting from the date of the external award’s commencement.

How to Apply

Interested candidates should submit the following:

1. Curriculum vitae
2. An academic writing sample (e.g., published article, policy report, NGO report, graduate writing sample, or a chapter of their Master’s dissertation)

In addition to the above, you must submit the following documents:

1. PhD proposal including an outline of the proposed research and research methodology in relation to BILQIS objectives and research questions (maximum 1,500 words).
2. Two academic references: Please note that the applicant must contact referees in advance to ensure that references are received before the closing date/time for this scholarship.
3. All academic transcripts.
4. Applicants whose first language is not English must submit satisfactory evidence of competence in written and spoken English, i.e., overall IELTS 6.5 (including a minimum of 6.5 in the reading and writing parts and no part below 6.0) or 90 in the TOEFL iBT (with a minimum of 22 (reading) and 24 (writing) and no part below 20.)
5. Fluency in Arabic or Persian or Norwegian or Swedish is desirable.

Deadline

The required documentation, including letters of reference, should be emailed to bilqis@universityofgalway.ie no later than 28 January 2025.