Christoph Günther studied Middle Eastern Studies, in Bamberg and Cairo and earned his doctorate in 2013 from the University of Leipzig. He is interested in religious, social, and political movements in the modern Middle East and North Africa, visual cultures and iconography, and the sociology of religion.
At the Department of Anthropology and African Studies, Christoph is the Principal Investigator of the Junior Research Group Jihadism on the Internet. The group receives funding from the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) for a period of five years. Together with 2 Postdocs and 3 PhD students from Middle Eastern Studies, Film and Media Studies, and Anthropology, Christoph will assess the way in which Jihadi movements communicate through videos and pictures. The research group will also evaluate, how these communicative propositions are received by various audiences and in which ways these audiences appropriate or transform these visual messages and feed them back into the communicative process.
Before coming to the Department of Anthropology and African Studies, he was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle (Saale). There, he prepared his second monograph in which he addresses The Islamic State’s identity politics and scrutinizes the symbolic repertoire that this religio-political movement generated during the past decade. Beyond, he has extensively published on the evolution, ideology, and political iconography of The Islamic State and its predecessors.