Professor Marloes Janson

Marloes Janson is Professor of West African Anthropology. She served as Associate Director of Research (2018-2021) and Interim Head of the Department of Anthropology and Sociology (2022-2023) at SOAS. She is a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy in the UK. Marloes holds a PhD in Anthropology from Leiden University, the Netherlands. Before joining SOAS in 2012, she was a researcher at Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient in Berlin, Germany.

Marloes’ publications include Islam, Youth, and Modernity in the Gambia: The Tablighi Jamaʻat (Cambridge University Press/International African Institute, 2013), which has been awarded the RAI Amaury Talbot Prize for African Anthropology 2014, a special issue of Africa (2016) co-edited with Birgit Meyer, entitled ‘Studying Islam and Christianity in Africa: Moving Beyond a Bifurcated Field’, Crossing Religious Boundaries: Islam, Christianity, and ‘Yoruba Religion’ in Lagos, Nigeria (Cambridge University Press/International African Institute, 2021), a special issue of Journal of Religion in Africa (2016) co-edited with Dorothea Schulz, entitled ‘Religion and Masculinities in Africa’, and the co-edited volume Religious Plurality in Africa: Coexistence, Conviviality, Conflict (James Currey, 2024). Together with the Nigerian award-winning photographer Akintunde Akinleye she curated the travelling photo exhibition ‘The Spiritual Highway: Religious Worldmaking in Megacity Lagos (Nigeria)’. Marloes’ work was nominated as one of over 100 ‘Creative Sparks’ from UK universities who are being honoured to showcase the importance of the creative industries and to celebrate the contribution of UK universities to the sector (https://www.soas.ac.uk/about/news/soas-celebrated-contributing-uks-creative-excellence).

ORCID: 0000-0002-4281-7364

Link to book support hours appointment: Office Hours Term 3.docx (sharepoint.com)

Marloes Janson’s research interests are at the intersection of anthropology and religion. West Africa (the Gambia and Nigeria) is her ethnographic area of specialization. Her research focuses on Islamic reform movements, faith-based organisations (FBOs), and new religious movements in Lagos, Nigeria, which mix Islam, Christianity, and Yoruba religion. Her ethnographic and conceptual work connects with her long-term project to develop a new comparative framework that shifts from a narrow analysis of religious traditions as mutually exclusive towards a perspective that focuses on the complex dynamics of their actual entanglements. By means of ethnographic case studies that illustrate religion in the Nigerian megacity Lagos through religious practice and lived experiences, her work takes account of the ambivalence, inconsistence, and unpredictability of lived religion, proposing plurality as an analytical frame for exploring the conceptual and methodological possibilities that may open as a result.

More recently, Marloes started investigating the role played by religious organisations in providing infrastructures that sustain social, cultural, and economic life in south-west Nigeria. Infrastructures of these kinds supplement and, sometimes, replace those of the state, providing succour and sustenance under stressful conditions of rapid urbanization.