Research Interests
Religious, social, and political movements in the modern Middle East and North Africa; visual cultures and iconography; sociology of religion
Research Areas
Middle East, North Africa
Links
Project: Jihadism on the Internet: Images and Videos, their Appropriation, and Dissemination
Profile
Dr Christoph Günther's research interests include religio-political movements in the modern Middle East, visual cultures and iconography, and the sociology of religion. He studied Middle Eastern studies, history, and Arabic in Bamberg and Cairo from 2002 to 2008. From 2010 to 2013 he was a doctoral student in the Religious Non-Conformism and Cultural Dynamics research training group at Leipzig University. During this time he wrote his PhD thesis, Ein zweiter Staat im Zweistromland? Genese und Ideologie des ‘Islamischen Staates Irak‘ (‘A Second State in Mesopotamia? The Genesis and Ideology of the Islamic State of Iraq’). In this study, he analysed primary sources to provide information on the historical background, genesis, and ideological framework of a particular jihadist group in Iraq that was later to become the Islamic State (IS) movement. In 2016–2017, he was a postdoctoral research fellow in the Department ‘Integration and Conflict’ at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, where he worked on a book manuscript focusing on the Islamic State's attempts to produce a particular kind of Sunni identity – an 'Islamic State Identity'. He is continuing these activities as a research associate of the Department ‘Law & Anthropology’.