Elisabeth Becker-Topkara

Associate Fellow

Freigeist Fellow at the Max Weber Institute for Sociology, Heidelberg University

Elisabeth Becker-Topkara is a sociologist, educator and writer, currently a Freigeist (“Free Spirit”) Fellow/Assistant Professor at the Max Weber Institute of Sociology, University of Heidelberg and a Senior Fellow at the Yale University Center for Cultural Sociology. She further runs Inscribing Plurality, as a Landecker Democracy Fellow, which brings emerging Jewish and Muslim writers together with the aim of pluralising discourse and is co-editor of the journal Patterns of Prejudice, dedicated to understanding the motivations for, and potential solutions for discrimination.

She received her PhD in Sociology from Yale University in 2018, her master’s degree in Forced Migration and Refugee Studies from Oxford University in 2007, and her BA in Sociology and a College Scholar (focusing on the effects of trauma on culture in the context of forced migration).

Her work focuses on the experiences of Muslims and Jews in Europe and United States, as well as Muslim-Jewish relations. She currently collaborate with schools and universities on combatting Islamophobia and anti-semitism.

Mosques in the Metropolis: Incivility, Caste, and Contention in Europe (The University of Chicago Press, 2021).