Dr Safet HadziMuhamedovic

Safet is an anthropologist of shared sacred landscapes, syncretism and post-conflict interfaith relations. He joined the University of Cambridge in 2020, first as Research Associate in Interfaith Relations, and then as Teaching Associate in Anthropology of Religion. At Fitzwilliam College, he is the acting Director of Studies in Theology, Religion and the Philosophy of Religion (2022/23), a Bye-Fellow and a Research Associate. He is also an Affiliated Researcher with the Cambridge Interfaith Programme and a Member of the University's Research Integrity Advisory Panel. 

At the Faculty of Divinity, he convenes 'Understanding Contemporary Religion' (A6); 'Shared Sacred Heritage: Anthropological Approaches' (D2b), an MPhil module 'Contemporary Religious Conflict: Ethnographic Approaches', and co-convenes 'Religious Encounter' (B9) and the CIP Academic Summer School in Inter-faith Relations. 

Prior to Cambridge, Safet taught a wide array of anthropological courses at SOAS University of London, the University of Bristol, Goethe University Frankfurt and Goldsmiths, University of London. He holds a PhD in Anthropology from Goldsmiths, an MPhil in Social Anthropology from the University of Cambridge (Hughes Hall) and BA degrees in History of Art and Sociology from the University of Sarajevo and Kenyon College.

Safet's research first and foremost considers the historical and contemporary relations between Christians, Muslims and Roma in Bosnia. It builds upon his long-term ethnographic fieldwork in the Dinaric Bosnian highlands, as well as stints of fieldwork across Bosnia, the Basque Country, Palestine, Israel, and archival research in Sarajevo and the Hague. He has written on syncretic landscapes, temporality and historicity, war crime archives, political agency of nonhuman beings and ontological approaches to the question of home. He is the author of Waiting for Elijah: Time and Encounter in a Bosnian Landscape (2018, 2021) and the co-editor (with Marija Grujić) of Post-Home: Dwelling on Loss, Belonging and Movement (2019). His current major projects investigates syncretic cosmologies, nationalism and subterranean rivers in south Bosnia.

Safet is the Principal Investigator on the Shared Sacred project, which focuses on the spatial and temporal modes of proximity between persons and communities of ‘different’ faith. For this project, he was awarded Public Engagement Starter Fund by the University of Cambridge to curate an exhibition of anthropological photography on Shared Sacred Landscapes. 

Over the next four years, following a large-scale grant from the European Cooperation in Science and Technology (COST), Safet will be co-leading a research network titled Traces as Research Agenda for Climate Change, Technology Studies, and Social Justice (TRACTS). This project brings together scholars from disciplines of the social sciences and humanities with artists, decolonial activists, memorialisation experts and legal professionals to bridge current cultural, political and geographical gaps in research on traces. 

He is also part of the Research Team on a four-year project titled A Red Golden Legend: Muslim Hagiographic Experiences in the Former USSR and Popular Democracies, supported by the French National Research Agency (ANR). 

Safet is a co-founder of the Xenia Series: Seminars in the Anthropology of Travel, Tourism and Pilgrimage, with Professor Tom Selwyn and Geoff DeVito. He has previously worked on a large-scale ERC project into transitional justice in Bosnia and Spain and has co-founded the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research of Visual Culture in Sarajevo. He has been recipient of a number of prestigious research awards (including the Open Society Foundations' Civil Society Scholar Award, 2015) and teaching recognitions.