Prof. Dr Serena Tolino

Serena Tolino is Associate Professor at the Unit Middle East and Muslim Societies and co-director of the Department of Social Anthropology and Cultural Studies at the University of Bern. Her primary research interests are the history of Islamic law, gender and sexuality in the Middle East, slavery and labour in the pre-modern Islamic world. She currently leads the SNSF-funded project TraSIS: Trajectories of Slavery in Islamicate Societies (2022-2026) and the SNSF Starting Grant project TraIL: Tracing Labour in Islamicate Legal Traditions (2024-2029) and co-leads—with A. Huang (Lübeck), T. Hodel (Bern), and S. Schwandt (Bielefeld)—the SNSF/DFG-funded project The Flow: From Deep-Learning to Digital Analysis and their Role in the Humanities (2023-2026).

Among her most recent works are: “Slavery at the Turn of the Twentieth Century: Ḥudā Shaʿrāwī’s Memoirs as a Source of Social History?”, in Wissenskulturen muslimischer Gesellschaften. Philosophische und islamwissenschaftliche Zugänge. Festschrift für Anke von Kügelgen, ed. Kata Moser and Serena Tolino (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2023); “Naming Eunuchs in Islamicate Societies”, in J. Bischoff, S. Conermann, and M. Gymnich (eds.), Naming, Defining, Phrasing Strong Asymmetrical Dependencies: A Textual Approach, Dependency and Slavery Studies 8 (Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter, 2023); “Eunuchs in the Sunnī Legal Discourse: Reflections on the Gender of Castrated Men”, Studi Magrebini 20(2) (2022); “Eunuchs in the Fatimid Empire: Ambiguities, Gender and Sacredness”, in A. Höfert, M. Mesley, and S. Tolino (eds.), Celibate and Childless Men in Power: Ruling Eunuchs and Bishops in the Pre-Modern World (London/New York: Routledge, 2018). She also co-edited The Human Body in Islamic Law. Essays in Memory of Agostino Cilardo (with Carlo de Angelo), a special dossier of Studi Magrebini; Sex and Desire in Muslim Cultures. Beyond Norms and Transgression from the Abbasids to the Present Day (co-edited with Aymon Kreil and Lucia Sorbera, I.B. Tauris, 2021), and Slavery and the Slave Trade in Ethiopian Studies (Supplement to AETHIOPICA), with A. Meckelburg, G. Bonacci, and A. Hassen (forthcoming)