Bio
A. Sophie Lauwers is a political philosopher working on secularism, Christian privilege, racial and religious inequality, and multiculturalism. She is FNRS postdoctoral researcher at the Hoover Chair at UCLouvain, where her current research focuses on questions of religious recognition and the secular state.
Prior to coming to UCLouvain, Sophie was a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Edinburgh, and at the Institute of Philosophy and Faculty of Theology and Religious Studies at KU Leuven.
Sophie obtained her PhD in philosophy at the University of Aberdeen, as part of the interdisciplinary Marie Skłodowska-Curie POLITICO project. Her thesis investigated how current models of political secularism contribute to secular and Christian hegemony in contemporary Europe, and proposed a new model of political secularism. Building on this research, she is now writing a book on political secularism and hegemony
Projects
In her PhD project, Anna Sophie Lauwers investigates to which extent political secularism in Europe is still influenced by its Christian past, and whether it contributes to a (secular) Christian hegemony at the expense of religious and racial minorities. She focuses primarily on the work of Gil Anidjar and Charles Taylor, bridging debates in critical secularism studies and normative political philosophy.
Publications
Journal Article
Rethinking Secularization: The Religion-Secular Binary, Christianity, and the Politics of Exclusion
By A. Sophie Lauwers
September 2026
Philosophy & Social Criticism
Article
The Ambivalence of Religious Recognition
By A. Sophie Lauwers
March 2026
Secular Studies
Article
De natie tussen demos en ethnos
By A. Sophie Lauwers
September 2025
Karakter: Tijdschrift van Wetenschap
Journal article
Who belongs to the “historic nation”? Fictive ethnicity and (iI)liberal uses of religious heritage
By A. Sophie Lauwers
March 2024
Ethnic and Racial Studies
Article
Religion, secularity, culture? Investigating Christian privilege in Western Europe
By A. Sophie Lauwers
June 2022
Ethnicities
Journal article
Is Islamophobia (Always) Racism?
By A. Sophie Lauwers
December 2019
Critical Philosophy of Race