Maaike Voorhoeve is an assistant professor in the European Studies department, specializing in law and gender in the Muslim world, with a focus on North Africa. at the Humanities Faculty. She teaches courses on Islamic law, Islam and gender, transitional justice in the Arab world, and area studies. Voorhoeve is affiliated to the Amsterdam School of Historical Studies.
After her PhD (University of Amsterdam, 2011), Voorhoeve held post-doctoral positions at Harvard Law School, Freie Universität, Humboldt Universität, and the Ecole d'Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales. She was an Alexander von Humboldt Fellow and affiliated to the EUME programme of the Forum Transregionale Studien in Berlin. Between 2020 and 2024, Voorhoeve was chief editor of the Dutch journal ZemZem on the Middle East, Nort Africa and Islam. Until September 2023, she was co-director of the Amsterdam Centre for Middle Eastern Studies.
Voorhoeve published two books, Family Law in Islam (I.B. Tauris, 2012, 2nd ed. 2016) and Gender and Divorce Law in North Africa (I.B. Tauris, 2014), and a number of articles on legislation and adjudication in the field of family law and gender-coded criminal law in the Muslim world.
Voorhoeve's current research project examines the intersection between law, gender and imperialism, or: the influence of imperialism on gender-coded law in Muslim territories. Her focus lies on French imperialism in the Maghreb and West-Africa, but she's equally interested in the influence of Dutch, British, Russian and Ottoman imperialism and its consequences for the law in Muslim territories.