Simal Zagra
Simal Zagra is a research associate at the Institute for the Study of Religions, Leipzig University. She holds a BA in Political Science from Boğaziçi University and an MA in Interdisciplinary Studies of the Middle East from Freie Universität Berlin. She is interested generally in the sonic lives of religious practice, and particularly in how sound carries what institutions cannot contain, how the senses carry and redistribute what different regimes of knowledge organize differently, and how bodies move between the murmur of ritual and the registers that claim to name it. Her work moves across the study of sound and auditory culture, lived religion, material religion, music therapy, and the anthropology of secularism. She attends in particular to the ways Turkish religious life sits uneasily within the categories built to administer it, and makes documentary films when writing feels insufficient.
