Heidemarie Winkel is professor of sociology at the University of Bielefeld (Germany). Before she worked as a research fellow at the University of Trier, the Technical University of Berlin and the University of Mainz; she continued as assistant professor at the Universities of Erfurt and Potsdam, and she substituted for the professorship at the Technical University of Dresden. From 2005 to 2007 she completed a research project in the Middle East (Palestine, Lebanon and Egypt) on the shifting of gender relations. Her main research interests are modern Arab societies, religious knowledge and gender arrangements as well as cultures of understanding and intercultural communication. Her theoretical research interests are cultural symbolisation and knowledge production as well as multiple modernities and multiple religiosities; methodologically she focuses on interpretive and qualitative methodology. Winkel is a board member of the Research Section Sociology of Religion in the German Sociological Association (DGS) and the Research Network Sociology of Religion in the European Sociological Association; she is also a member of the editorial board of the Journal of Religion, Society and Politics / Zeitschrift für Religion, Gesellschaft und Politik.
Latest publications are: Multiple religiosities, entangled modernities and gender: what is different about gender across religious cultures?, in: Zeitschrift für Religion, Gesellschaft und Politik 1 (1), pp.1-21; a special issue of GENDER Vol. 1/2017: Negotiating Gender Relations – Arab Women and the Transformation of Arab Societies, ed. together with Viola Raheb, Ulrike Bechmann and Sabine Schäfer; Culture, Gender, and Traditional Authority: A Sociological Approach on Power Relations in Middle Eastern Churches, in: About Gender. International Journal of Gender Studies, Vol. 5 (10) 2016, pp. 145-165; Religion und globale Modernen. Jenseits funktionaler Differenzierung und eines methodologischen Säkularismus, in: Zeitschrift für Theoretische Soziologie Vol. 5 (2), pp. 282-295.