I am 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. I further run Inscribing Plurality, as a Landecker Democracy Fellow, which brings emerging Jewish and Muslim writers together with the aim of pluralising discourse and am co-editor of the journal Patterns of Prejudice, dedicated to understanding the motivations for, and potential solutions for discrimination.

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

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

As the principle investigator for the Muslims for American Progress New York City Project, I have actively worked to confront and dismantle stereotypes about Muslims in the United States. You can see a video from my presentation at the Brooklyn Historical Institute on C-SPAN here.

In my Freigeist project “Invisible Architects: Jews, Muslims, and the Construction of Europe,” I highlight how Jews and Muslims have contributed to the formation of European societies.

I write books and articles for newspapers, magazines and academic outlets. I am author of Mosques in the Metropolis: Incivility, Caste ,and Contention in Europe (University of Chicago Press).I am currently writing a literary non-fiction book Passages: The Moving Lives of Jewish Berlin, represented by Jessica Craig Literary. The first piece of this project, “Walking with Walter Benjamin: The Jewish Lives and Afterlives of “the City god,” Berlin” was published in the literary magazine The New England Review.

I further write for mainstream outlets on issues related to religious diversity, including publications with The Washington Post, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Religion and Politics, Tablet Magazine, The Forward, Kveller, Global Dialogue, and A Beautiful Perspective, and was a 2021 journalism fellow at Tablet Magazine.

You can contact me at: elisabethbecker@aya.yale.edu.