Staff and fellows

Dr Brenda Mathijssen is Associate Professor of Geography and Psychology of Religion. Her research studies the way humans deal with death and grief in contemporary Europe, with special attention to meaning, rituals, materiality, and spatiality. From 2021-2025 she will work on an NWO Veni project that maps the emergence and significance of sustainable funeral practices. She is also associated with the Centre for Death and Life Studies at Durham University and a member of the European Network on Death Rituals. Her recent publications include Ritual Worlding: Exploring the Self-and-world-making Efficacy of Rituals (Yearbook for Ritual and Liturgical Studies, 2023) en Intersections of (infra)structural violence and cultural inclusion: the geopolitics of minority cemeteries and crematoria provision (TIBG, 2021). She also made the podcast series De PodKist (2024) and the documentary Het Nieuwe Rouwen (NTR FOCUS, 2024) for a wide audience.

Dr Gorazd Andrejč is Assistant Professor of Philosophy of Religion at University of Groningen, and a Senior Researcher at the Institute for Philosophical Studies, Science and Research Centre of Koper, Slovenia. He has completed a MSt at University of Cambridge (2009) and a PhD at University of Exeter (2013). Gorazd’s research is focused on the philosophy of religious language and communication, religious experience and epistemology, liberal religion, as well as on the intersections between natural sciences, religion, and technology, and between religion and environment. One of his projects Creatures, Humans, Robots, funded by the Slovenian Research Agency (ARRS), explored the tensions between humanist and posthumanist interpretations of humanness, religion, and technology. Recent publications include ‘Pantheism from the Perspective of Wittgensteinian Nonoverlapping Magisteria’ (2023), and ‘The Problem of the Self-Ascription of Sainthood’ (2022). Wittgenstein and Interreligious Disagreement: Philosophical and Theological Perspectives (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016).

Brenda Bartelink is Assistant Professor at the University of Groningen. Her research is focussed on health, care, gender and sexuality in relation to religion and secularity. She is currently working on various projects, includingreligious actors approaches to sexual wellbeing in African-Dutch communities andfoster care and religious diversity. She also works on gender based violence in relation to religion, amongst others leading to a volume co-edited with Tamsin Bradley and Chia Longman with Routledge in 2022. In all her projects she works closely with societal actors, civil society organisations and policymakers to strengthen connections between academic research and practice.

Recent publications include:

• 2020. The ambivalence of the immanent: Human security and the development response to HIV and AIDS in Uganda. In J. Tarusarira, & E. Chitando (Eds.), Themes in Religion and Human Security Routledge, Taylor and Francis group.
• with E. Le Roux.2020. What is in a name? Identifying the harm in 'harmful traditional practices'. In O. Wilkinson, & K. Kraft (Eds.), International Development Actors and Local Faith Communities: Ideological and Cultural Encounters Routledge, Taylor and Francis group.
• Bartelink, B., & Knibbe, K.(2019).Seksueel welzijn in de context van religieuze en culturele diversiteit. Rijksuniversiteit Groningen.

Christoph Jedan is professor of Ethics and Comparative Philosophy of Religion in the Faculty of Religion, Culture and Society (University of Groningen). His research interests include the intersections of religion and philosophy (e.g. religious aspects of ancient Greco-Roman philosophy, religion and politics, postsecularism), philosophy and theology as therapeutic forms of thinking (e.g. consolation), and questions of justice relating to public health and marginalized groups (e.g. funerary provision for migrant and minority groups).

He has (co)authored and (co)edited a dozen books and collections, including Stoic Virtues: Chrysippus and the Religious Character of Stoic Ethics (Continuum; 2009),(with Arie L. Molendijk and Justin Beaumont) Exploring the Postsecular: The Religious, the Political and the Urban (Brill, 2010), and (with Avril Maddrell and Eric Venbrux) Consolationscapes in the Face of Loss: Grief and Consolation in Space and Time (Routledge, 2019).

Dr. Kim Knibbe is Assistant Professor Sociology and Anthropology of Religion at the University of Groningen. In her work, she focuses on intersections of religion, gender and sexuality. There is especially an emphasis on theorising religion and culture inductively in pluralistic contexts, based on ethnographic research. Furthermore, she has published a series of theoretical and methodological reflections on studying religion that address how the experience of lived religion, as a mode of experiencing reality that is somehow labelled as ‘different’, can be approached in ethnographic research. She recently completed the 5-year project "Sexuality, Religion and Secularism" (funded by NWO). Currently, she is developing new research on the role of religion and everyday ethics during pregnancy, particularly in shaping kinship and social reproduction.

Elena Mucciarelli, director of the Institute of Indian Studies, is Gonda Lecturer and Assistant Professor of Hinduism in the Sanskrit Tradition at the Faculty of Religion, Culture and Society at the University of Groningen. She is member of the ERC-funded research project NEEM (The New Ecology of Expressive Modes in Early-Modern South India), directed by David Shulman, and has a vast experience in various international and interdisciplinary scholarly teams.

After obtaining a joint PhD in Indic Studies from the Universities of Tübingen and Turin (2011), Dr. Mucciarelli was appointed research assistant at Univerisità degli Studi di Cagliari (2012-2013), and at the University of Tübingen (2016-2017) for the creation of the "Gundert Portal". In 2014-2015 she was principal investigator in the research project “Kings of the Wild: The Re-use of Local and Vedic Elements in the Legitimation Process of Medieval Karnataka” financed by DFG and carried out at the University of Tübingen. From 2017 to 2020 she has been research fellow at the Martin Buber Society, Hebrew University (Israel).

In her research, Mucciarelli focuses on the cultural history of South India combining philology, anthropology, and media studies. Her holistic approach brings together the study of primary sources in several languages and field work, especially in South India where she has been going for the last 10 years to study and document ritual practices as well as a unique form of engendered temple theater tradition. Mucciarelli's scholarly interests encompass the study of performative and ritual traditions, the conceptualization of magic and healing through the analysis of ritual practices and textualized knowledge, and the articulation of materiality and cultural techniques in relation to indigenous categories.

Dr. Hanneke Muthert is Professor Psychology of Religion with special attention for Spiritual Care and Wellbeing at the University of Groningen. She studied theology in Groningen and received her PhD in 2007 with Verlies en verlangen, een onderzoek naar verliesverwerking bij schizofrenie (Van Gorcum Publishers) with as her supervisors: religious psychologist Patrick Vandermeersch and psychiatrist Cees Slooff. By now she has been working at the University of Groningen for over 20 years, but only fairly recently full-time. Indeed, another track besides research and teaching is practice. With great pleasure she worked as a spiritual caregiver at GGZ Drenthe and in her own practice. Her main research topics are about how people need to share their existential issues in a constructive way - in different work and care contexts. Her projects span over a range of topics such as: the earthquake region Groningen - disaster chaplaincy; UMCG: addressing the spiritual dimension in hospital care; meaningful work: student internship project that stimulates meaningful exchanges in organisations by using a scan; low literacy and meaning making in east Groningen; grief, trauma and religion/spirituality in Mental Health Care; and finally spiritual care in psychedelic treatment in the context of depression/end of life.

Anja Visser is Assistant Professor Spiritual Care at the University of Groningen. Her research is focused on the organization of spiritual care and effect research in chaplaincy. Improvement of the quality of research on spirituality and spiritual care is a focal point in her work.

Jelle Wiering is a lecturer at the Faculty of Religion, Culture and Society at the University of Groningen. His main research interests are organizational ethnography, meaningful work and dirty work. In 2024, he concluded 1.5 years of ethnographic research at a donkey shelter, and in September he will embark on a project that will explore notions of meaningfulness amongst slaughterhouse employees.. In 2020, Wiering defended his PhD thesis Secular Practices: the production of Religious Difference in the Dutch field of Sexual Health. Previously, Wiering conducted anthropological fieldwork among Navayana Buddhists in Utrecht, and Dutch pilgrims traveling to Santiago de Compostela.

Inge Wichgers is a postdoctoral researcher of the University of Groningen and the Protestant Theological University. She has a PhD in educational sciences and thus is interested in education about meaning making. Together with others, Dr. Wichgers is working on a systematic review on the effectiveness of education on meaning making and spirituality within palliative care. Next to this she is involved with educational modules within the Kenniswerkplaats Zingeving en Geestelijke Verzorging which are developed through various sector projects.

Catharina Gerigk, MA

PhD project: Spiritual care in healthcare: The effects of a spiritual care training on patients, relatives and healthcare professionals

As a scholarship PhD candidate at the UMCG and RUG, Catharina Gerigk analyses the effects of spiritual care in healthcare. Specifically, she looks at the project "zorg voor zin als niet alles is wat het lijkt", a spiritual care training that was conceptualized and is currently being implemented at the UMCG and various other healthcare institutions. This training is intended for all people involved in patient care. It aims at bridging the gap between patients' wish to have their caretakers attend to their spiritual needs on the one hand, and the healthcare professionals' perceived lack of competence to do so on the other. In her research, Catharina focuses on the phenomenological experience of giving and receiving spiritual care and the impact of the training on patients, their relatives, as well as the healthcare professionals themselves.

Sujin Rosie is promovenda aan de Rijksuniversiteit Groningen. Her research focuses on available and attainable care for meaning at home. To this end, she studies which differentiation is helpful from three perspectives: with regard to the clients, is thinking in target groups adequate; with regard to professionals, is the distinction between different professional roles adequate; and with regards to the concept of meaning in life, what is the literacy of the clients and professionals when it comes to meaning?

Her PhD research is partially embedded in the Kenniswerkplaats Zingeving (KWP). With this, she has already been involved in two learning networks of the KWP: earthquake area and low literacy & poverty. Additionally, her PhD research gives special attention to people living in poverty and/or with low literacy.