Unit for the Study of the Middle East and Muslim Societies, University of Bern
E-mail: serena.tolino@unibe.ch
Biography
Serena Tolino is Associate Professor at the Unit for the Study of the Middle East and Muslim Societies and Co-Director of the Department of Social Anthropology and Cultural Studies at the University of Bern. In Fall 2025, she will be Visiting Professor at the Institute of Oriental Studies at Sapienza University of Rome. Previously, she held a Visiting Professorship at the Department of Excellence Asia, Africa and Mediterranean at the University of Naples “L’Orientale” (Fall 2024), and was a Senior Fellow at the Heinz Heinen Kolleg at the Bonn Center for Dependency and Slavery Studies (Spring 2020). Before that, she was an Assistant Professor of Islamic Studies at the University of Hamburg (2016-2020), a post-doc at the University of Zurich (2012-2016) and a Visiting Fellow at the Islamic Legal Studies Program at Harvard University (Fall 2013).
Serena holds a Ph.D. and the title of Doctor Europaeus from the University of Naples “L’Orientale” and the Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg, where she graduated summa cum laude. She completed her BA and MA in “Sciences of Languages, History and Cultures of Islamic and Mediterranean Countries” at the University of Naples “L’Orientale”. During her MA, she spent three years in Cairo studying Arabic.
At the University of Bern, she currently serves as Director of the Graduate School of the Arts and Humanities at the Walter Benjamin Kolleg and as Co-President of the Committee for Equal Opportunities at the Faculty of Humanities. She is also an active member of several academic and professional bodies, including the Swiss Society for the Middle East and Islamic Cultures, the Swiss Asia Society, and the Academic Council of the German Middle East Studies Association for Contemporary Research and Documentation. Additionally, she serves on the editorial boards of Die Welt des Islams, Studi Magrebini, Asiatische Studien – Études Asiatiques, as well as the book series Welten des Islams (De Gruyter) and Ethics and Society in the Middle East (Ergon).
Her research focuses on the history of Islamic law, gender and sexuality in the Middle East, and slavery and labour in pre-modern Islamicate societies. She currently leads two major research projects funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF): TraSIS: Trajectories of Slavery in Islamicate Societies (2022–2026) and TraIL: Tracing Labour in Islamicate Legal Traditions (2024–2029). She also co-leads the SNSF/DFG-funded digital humanities project The Flow: From Deep-Learning to Digital Analysis and Their Role in the Humanities (2023–2026), alongside Angela Huang (Lübeck), Tobias Hodel (Bern), and Silke Schwandt (Bielefeld).
From 2018 to 2025, she served as Secretary of the International Society for Islamic Legal Studies.