Karin Willemse is Senior Lecturer at the Winter University Khartoum and Doctor of African Languages and Cultures at Leiden University. She previously worked as assistant Professor at the Erasmus School of History, Culture, and Communication at Erasmus University Rotterdam. She obtained a doctorate in cultural anthropology from Leiden University in 2001. Her dissertation entitled One Foot in Heaven: Narratives on Gender and Islam in Darfur, West-Sudan was published by Brill (2007). She was Chair of the Netherlands Association for Gender Studies and Feminist Anthropology (LOVA) and a member of the Academic Advisory Board of the Islam Research Project, a cooperative venture of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Leiden University. She worked with scholars from South Africa, Senegal and Sudan, and wrote extensively about her research in Sudan and South Africa.