Noemi Trucco
Co-President
Noemi Trucco is an SNF Postdoc Mobility Fellow at the Institute for Social Research and Interventions at the University of Luxembourg and an associate researcher at the Swiss Center for Islam and Society (SZIG) at the University of Fribourg, Switzerland. Noemi earned her PhD at SZIG, focusing on the subjectification of imams in Switzerland as part of an interdisciplinary project on social conflicts funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF). She is also the co-author of several studies on Islam and Muslim communities in Switzerland, commissioned by institutions such as the Swiss Federal Department of Foreign Affairs (FDFA) and the Federal Commission against Racism (FCR). Her main research interests include discourse and empirical subjectification research, Muslims and Islam in Europe, as well as processes of othering and exclusion.
Elife Biçer-Deveci
Co-President
Elife Biçer-Deveci is a historian specialising in the Ottoman Empire and Turkey. Her current research focuses on abstinence politics in Turkey and the influences of international organisations. She is the author of the book "The Ottoman Turkish Women's Movement in the Context of International Women's Organisations" (Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2017) and a number of articles dealing with the history of the "alcohol problem" in Turkey. She has been a visiting scholar at various foreign institutions (Central European University, University of Oxford and Freie Universität Berlin) and most recently an Interdisciplinary Research Fellow at the Walter Benjamin Kolleg of the University of Bern.
Sophie Glutz von Blotzheim
Vice-President
Sophie Glutz von Blotzheim studied Arabic at the University of Geneva with a focus on general linguistics, comparative literature, Mesopotamia, Assyrian and Sumerian. She has lived in Scotland for one year (1999-2000) and one year in Syria (2009-2010) and is fluent in German, French, English, Arabic (Arabic and Syrian dialect), Italian and Spanish. For more than fifteen years she has been passionate about the Arabic language in all its forms: grammar of the standard language, literature, usage phenomena, dialect forms, etc. Since 2007 she has been teaching Arabic for students in the first and second year at the University of Geneva. Since 2014, she has been responsible for the publication of the SGMOIK bulletin, which is published twice a year.
César Jaquier
Administrator/Treasurer
César Jaquier holds a PhD in history from the University of Neuchâtel and the Université Lumière Lyon 2. His research focuses on mobility, borders and space in the Mashreq in the early twentieth century, with a related interest in imperial, economic and environmental history. His thesis, completed in September 2022, examines the reshaping of the Syrian-Iraqi region in terms of mobility, territoriality and regional integration by articulating a history of the Baghdad-Damascus route in the 1920s and 1930s. César Jaquier previously studied history, social sciences and Arabic (classical and dialectal) in Switzerland and Lebanon. He is currently involved in a number of research and scientific communication projects, and works on the documentation and promotion of museum collections. In parallel, he is pursuing a post-graduate degree in museology.
