Juliane Hammer
· ProfessorUniversity of North Carolina at Chapel Hill · Religious Studies
Active 1984–2025
About
Juliane Hammer is a Professor in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She holds a Ph.D. in Islamic Studies from Humboldt University, Berlin, and an M.A. in Islamic Studies with minors in Iranian studies and sociology. Her scholarly trajectory includes research on Palestinian women and diaspora experiences, as well as a decade of work on American Muslim communities, focusing on women, gender, and sexuality in contemporary Muslim contexts. Hammer's work combines ethnographic and textual analysis methods in interdisciplinary, multi-method research that emphasizes lived experiences alongside textual sources. Her notable publication, Peaceful Families: American Muslim Efforts against Domestic Violence, published by Princeton University Press in 2019, explores religiously framed efforts within Muslim communities to address domestic violence, situating these efforts within broader discourses on gender roles, marriage, and societal processes. She is currently working on a monograph titled Patriarchal Islam: Gender, Sex, and Love in the Muslim American Public Square, which examines debates on gender, marriage, and sexuality in American Muslim communal discourse. Her research interests include gender and sexuality in Muslim communities, activism as religious practice, Islamic theory and method, Sufism, and modern approaches to the Qur’an. Hammer's work engages with Islamic studies, American religions, women’s and gender studies, sexuality studies, and critical race theory.
Research topics
- Sociology
- Social Science
- Gender studies
- Political Science
- Law
- Philosophy
- Pedagogy
- Linguistics
- Theology
Selected publications
Jagged edges: exploring Muslim efforts against sexual violence
Religion · 2025-07-31 · 1 citations
article1st authorCorrespondingPedagogies of Resistance: Why Anti-Muslim Racism Matters
UNC Libraries · 2025-06-27
articleOpen accessThe following interview with a collective of scholars describes the organization, conceptualization, and thematic framework of the online syllabus #IslamophobiaisRacism. The goals of the syllabus include theorizing anti-Muslim racism and developing strategies to combat white supremacy.
Gender Matters: Normativity, Positionality, and the Politics of Islamic Studies
UNC Libraries · 2025-09-19
articleOpen access1st authorCorrespondingOnce, a few years back, I was asked by a graduate student at a conference how I could substantiate my claim that all our scholarship in Islamic studies has political implications. His own research focused on the medieval textual tradition and he could see no political relevance and thus no responsibility for any political implications of his work. Indeed, he seemed rather disturbed by my forceful assertion that we cannot escape the politics of knowledge production, no matter how hard we try to insist that the responsibility is not there if we do not acknowledge it. It was certainly not the first time that my insistence on recognizing the political significance of scholarly work in Islamic studies was challenged. But this time, certainly owing in part to more institutional security gained through tenure, I took him up on his challenge and started writing more openly and intentionally about questions and debates regarding normativity and positionality in Islamic studies. These are the questions that animate my research, inform my work with graduate students, and influence my teaching. They are, I would argue, still not at the forefront of methodological and theoretical reflections in much of Islamic and religious studies scholarship. One way to explore the politics of knowledge production in our field is through something that we have debated at some length, namely scholarly normativity, religious normativity, and the positionality of scholars of Islam/religion.
Muslim Women’s Religious and Social Activism in the United States
Oxford University Press eBooks · 2023-11-20
book-chapterOpen access1st authorCorrespondingAbstract This chapter presents a critical framework for considering the historical process, diversity, and politics of Muslim women’s activism in the United States. In the first part, it sketches the following four theoretical considerations: the relationship of Islam and feminism; the role of anti-Muslim hostility in shaping activism and scholarship about it; the relationship between scholarship and activism (or from a different angle, between practice and discourse); and the necessary consideration of women’s activism as not limited to “women’s issues.” In the second part, I offer a number of examples of organizations, movements, and individuals, including the Muslim Women’s League, Women in Islam, Karamah, the Peaceful Families Project, WISE, HEART Women and Girls, Sapelo Square, and the Muslim Anti-Racism Collaborative. This history-through-specific-examples allows for an analysis of the particularity of each example’s historical context and specificity, while still arguing for broader patterns and a sense of cohesion among them. Taken together, they form a more grounded and complex picture of the history of American Muslim women’s activism.
Against Homosexuality: Patriarchal Islam, US Muslims, and Religious Debate
2023-01-01 · 2 citations
book-chapter1st authorCorrespondingAfterword: Reflecting on Gender in Islamic Theology
2023-01-01
book-chapter1st authorCorrespondingGerechtigkeit, Feminismus und Islam: Muslimische Aktivistinnen in den USA
2023-01-01
book-chapter1st authorCorrespondingJourneys towards Gender Equality in Islam, By Ziba Mir-Hosseini
Journal of the American Academy of Religion · 2022-12-01 · 1 citations
article1st authorCorrespondingJournal Article Journeys towards Gender Equality in Islam. By Ziba Mir-Hosseini Get access Journeys towards Gender Equality in Islam By Ziba Mir-Hosseini Oneworld Academic, 2022. 259 pages. $30.00 (paperback). Juliane Hammer Juliane Hammer UNC Chapel Hill jhammer@email.unc.edu Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of the American Academy of Religion, lfad015, https://doi.org/10.1093/jaarel/lfad015 Published: 31 July 2023
Chapter 9. Constructing Islamic Studies: Gender, Power and Critique as Ethical Tools
Edinburgh University Press eBooks · 2022-01-05
book-chapter1st authorCorrespondingEdinburgh University Press eBooks · 2022-01-05
bookSaid (2003) is the classic account.Note the comments of Hughes (2007: 27) on the distinct stance of German-speaking Jewish intellectuals like Geiger and Goldziher who are ignored by Said, as was scholarship in the Nordic countries and Russia.Marchand (2010) provides a detailed analysis of German orientalism before 1945.Waardenburg (2002: 2) describes how Islamic studies in the 1950s in the Netherlands came to adopt anti-colonial sympathies.The pivot away from empire seems to have been particularly rapid here compared to France and Britain.Also, see Bennett 2013: 11-19. 3Waardenburg 1995. 7Modood 2012. 8Uslaner (2005) compares segregation and trust across North America, the United Kingdom, Sweden and Australia.Peach (2006) charts the relative segregation of different religious populations in Britain. 9There is a useful summary in Ford 2015: 585. 10 An overview of the relationship between the work of theology faculties and the anthropology of Islam in Scandinavia is given in Flaskerud and Leirvik (2018).Hoffmann (2019) reflects on the situation in Denmark.14 Sutton and Nanji 1996: 79.For the assumption that the Jewish experience needs to be expressed by a Jewish professor, see Imhoff 2018: 131. 15Eickelman and Piscatori 1996: 162.Also cf.Bashir (2017) for the Eurocentrism of many attempts to critique 'the West'. 16There was a strand of (self-) criticism by some orientalists that precedes Said.Note Claude Cahen's scathing comments on philologists who know no history and historians who know no Arabic (Nanji 1997:
Frequent coauthors
- 17 shared
Kecia Ali
- 16 shared
Moazzam Ali
World Health Organization
- 16 shared
Ayatollah Khomeini
New York University Press
- 16 shared
Immanuel Kant
New York University Press
- 16 shared
Emmanuel Lévinas
- 16 shared
Shahzad Bashir
- 16 shared
Syed Shoeb Ahmed
Princeton University
- 16 shared
Alexander Key
Harvard University Press
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