Author: Sophie Roche

Sophie Roche is a Research Associate at the Heidelberg Centre for Transcultural Studies of  the University of Heidelberg. She worked at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Germany and received her Ph D from Martin-Luther University Halle-Wittenberg in 2010. She studied youth as a socio-demographic factor (youth bulge) in Tajikistan and then joined the Zentrum Moderner Orient in Berlin in 2010 doing a project on jihad in text and context. She has authored several articles that contextualize Tajiks within theoretical debates such as conflict studies and transcultural studies, and worked on Islam in Europe and Russia, environmental disasters as well as Soviet ethnography. She has been awarded visiting scholarships by the Institute d’études de l’islam et des sociétés du monde musulman (IISMM) and by the Fondation Maison Science de l’Homme (FMSH), both in Paris.