Frédérick Madore, PhD

My two roles feed each other. At the Cluster of Excellence “Africa Multiple”(opens in new tab), I am Data Curator(opens in new tab) and a researcher in the Research Section Digitalities(opens in new tab). As curator, I help design the systems that make research data findable and reusable under the FAIR and CARE principles, and I work with colleagues on the digital literacy and ethical standards that curation demands. As Co-Principal Investigator of Islam’s ‘Peripheries’ (2026–2028), a Volkswagen Foundation project with Aksana Ismailbekova, I use AI to compare Islamic discourse in two multilingual collections, from West Africa and Central Asia. The project also tests new ways into them, from searching across languages to querying them in plain language through an AI assistant, with open-source tools that researchers in both regions can use.

My research draws on fifteen years of work on Islam in francophone West Africa and extensive fieldwork in the region. It examines how Muslim communities, particularly youth and women, have engaged with politics, education, and the public sphere in Benin, Burkina Faso, Côte d’Ivoire, and Togo since the 1960s. Before Bayreuth, I was a Research Fellow at Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient (ZMO)(opens in new tab) in Berlin, and before that a Banting Postdoctoral Fellow(opens in new tab) at the University of Florida(opens in new tab).

Beyond academia, I work with Communitology(opens in new tab) to produce specialised Country of Origin Information (COI) reports for asylum and immigration cases involving Benin, Côte d’Ivoire, and Togo.