Anna Sophie Lauwers

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.

Publications:

• Lauwers, A. S. (2026). Rethinking Secularization: The Religion-Secular Binary, Christianity, and the Politics of Exclusion. Philosophy & Social Criticism.
• Lauwers, A. S. (2026). The Ambivalence of Religious Recognition. Secular Studies, 8(1), 104-115.
• Lauwers, A.S. (2025). De natie tussen demos en ethnos. Karakter: Tijdschrift van Wetenschap. 91. 
• Lauwers, A. S. (2025). Review: Religion in Liberal Democracy as a Form of Life: Free and Equal. Religie & Samenleving.
• Lauwers, A. S. (2024). Who belongs to the “historic nation”? Fictive ethnicity and (iI) liberal uses of religious heritage. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 47(9), 1769-1790.
• Lauwers, A. S. (2023). Religion, secularity, culture? Investigating Christian privilege in Western Europe. Ethnicities, 23(3), 403-425.
• Lauwers, A.S. (2022). Review: The Privilege of Being Banal: Art, Secularism, and Catholicism in Paris. Reading Religion.
• Lauwers, A. S. (2019). Is Islamophobia (always) racism?. Critical Philosophy of Race, 7(2), 306-332.