Team Members
Prof. Dr Serena Tolino, University of Bern
Serena Tolino is Associate Professor at the Unit for the Study of the Middle East and Muslim Societies (MOMuG) and Co‑Director of the Department of Social Anthropology and Cultural Studies (SACS) at the University of Bern. Her research focuses on the history of Islamic law, LGBTQ rights, gender and sexuality in the Middle East, and slavery and labour in the pre‑modern Islamic world.
She serves as Principal Investigator of TraIL, where she investigates how labour was conceptualised in the pre‑modern period through discursive and documentary sources regulating labour relations (WP1) and examines how jurists addressed women’s labour and the strategies women employed to navigate a patriarchal legal system, thereby shedding light on their agency (WP2).
She is also the Principal Investigator of the SNSF‑funded project TraSIS: Trajectories of Slavery in Islamicate Societies and co‑leads—with Angela Huang (Lübeck), Tobias Hodel (Bern), and Silke Schwandt (Bielefeld)—the SNSF/DFG‑financed project The Flow: From Deep‑Learning to Digital Analysis and their Role in the Humanities.
Together with Gianluca Parolin, she hosts Shar3ī – The Podcast, a “virtual teahouse” where scholars of Islamic law come together to discuss their research and teaching, but also their personal interests and hobbies.
Dr Laila Makboul, University of Bern
Laila Makboul is a postdoctoral researcher at the Unit for the Study of the Middle East and Muslim Societies (Department of Social Anthropology and Cultural Studies) at the University of Bern. She holds a PhD (2019) from the University of Oslo with a dissertation on female Muslim intellectual-preachers in Saudi Arabia. Prior to her current position, she was a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Global Fellow with an individual research project titled “GlAntiFem: Globalizing Anti-Feminism: A Phenomenology of Transnational Networks of Islamic Women Organizations.”
As a Postdoc in the TraIL project she researches women’s labour in Islamic legal traditions.
Leonie Isch, University of Bern
Leonie Isch is a doctoral researcher at the Unit for the Study of the Middle East and Muslims Societies (Department of Social Anthropology and Cultural Studies) at the University of Bern. She has a BA in Islamic and Middle East Studies and an MA in Islamic Studies and Oriental Literatures from the University of Bern. As part of the SNSF-funded TraIL project, she focuses on the legal aspects of labour in 19th and 20th century Egypt.
Mohamed Ilyes Mechentel, University of Bern
Mohamed Ilyes Mechentel is currently a Research Associate and Digital Humanities expert in Islamic Studies at the at the Unit for the Study of the Middle East and Muslims Societies (Department of Social Anthropology and Cultural Studies) at the University of Bern. He holds an MA in Digital Technologies Applied to History from the École des Chartes, where he focused on the scientific challenges of processing historical sources through digital technologies. During his studies, he completed an internship at the Bibliothèque universitaire des langues et civilisations (BULAC), working with digital tools applied to Arabic texts on the TariMa project. He also interned at the Louvre, where he explored the application of HTR technologies to 19th century sources. Additionally, he contributed to the CallFront project at the Institut National d’Histoire de l’Art, which aims to collect and analyse scriptural data from the Islamic world.