Visiting Fellowships

Alwaleed Visiting Fellowships are available for up to three months allowing researchers with interests in the globalised Muslim world the opportunity to spend time at the University of Edinburgh with full access to all the university's resources.

If your research compliments any of the Alwaleed Centre's research clusters and you are looking for an opportunity to develop your research in a dynamic and suppportive academic environment, then we would be delighted to hear from you.

If you are accepted as an Alwaleed Visiting Fellow, the Alwaleed Centre will cover the £150 monthly fee which Visiting Fellows are required to pay to the School of Literatures, Languages and Cultures. When possible, you will be assigned desk space within the Alwaleed Centre and you will be granted full access to all library resources (both physical and digital).

In return, the Alwaleed Centre expects the following:

1. Acknowledgement of the Alwaleed Centre in any publications produced during your time as a Visiting Fellow.

2. Production of at least one working paper during your time as a Visiting Fellow.

3. The organisation of at least one workshop, public lecture/talk or a research-driven public engagement event. 

4. Attendence a fortnighlty Alwaleed Centre full team meetings.

If you are interested in an Alwaleed Visiting Fellowship, please contact us directly: thealwaleedcentre@ed.ac.uk.

Former Alwaleed Centre Visiting Fellows:

Dr Khadijah Elshayyal

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Dr Khadijah Elshayyal has recently completed successive postdoctoral and teaching fellowships at the  University of Edinburgh, where she organised and taught on a number of courses across IMES and the School of Divinity. With a specialism in the contemporary history of Muslims in Britain, she received her PhD from Royal Holloway, University of London. Her research interests lie in the representation, political and cultural activism of Muslims and ethnic minorities in the UK. She is author of "Muslim Identity Politics: Islam, activism and equality in Britain" (IB Tauris, 2018) and "Scottish Muslims in Numbers: understanding Scotland’s Muslims through the 2011 Census" (University of Edinburgh, 2016).

Dr Elshayyal is currently a Teaching Fellow at Hamad Bin Khalifa University as well as an Associate Fellow of the Alwaleed Centre.

Learn more about Dr Elshayyal's work

Dr Yahya Barry

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Dr Yahya Barry is a certified Minister of Religion (BA Theology, Islamic University of Madinah). He studied Religion in Peace & Conflict (MA, Uppsala, 2014) and the Religious Roots of Europe (MA, Copenhagen, 2013). His PhD (Edinburgh, 2019) researched Muslim responses to Right-wing Populism in the UK and Scandinavia. He has been consulted by the BBC Religion & Ethics board from 2016 to the present and is a regular contributor to BBC Scotland's Sunday Morning With programme.

Dr Barry has recently begun a Visiting Fellowshiup at the University of Copenhagen researching the experiences of black Muslims in Scotland and Denmark.

Learn more about Yahya's work

Dr Daan Beekers

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Dr Beekers' research focuses on religion, diversity and heritage in Europe, with a particular focus on Christianity and Islam. He obtained a PhD in Anthropology from the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam (2015) based on an ethnographic study of religious commitment among young, revivalist-oriented Protestant Christians and Sunni Muslims in the Netherlands. Subsequently, he conducted postdoctoral research at Utrecht University, studying the abandonment and repurposing of church buildings in the Netherlands. In 2018 he moved to Edinburgh to join the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities as a postdoctoral research fellow (October 2018-July 2019), and this was followed by his Visiting Fellowship at the Alwaleed Centre for the Study of Islam in the Contemporary World (August 2019-June 2020).

Daan is now an IASH-Alwaleed Research Fellow working on the project Diversity, Heritage, and Belonging: Spaces of Religious Entanglement in Scotland

Lean more about Dr Beekers' work