Manoël Pénicaud is a French anthropologist and a junior research fellow at the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS). He is based in Aix-en-Provence at the IDEMEC (Institute of European Mediterranean and Comparative Ethnology, Aix-Marseille University). He is a specialist in pilgrimages, shared holy places, interreligious dialogue, and Abrahamic hospitality.
Since 2000, he has worked on several pilgrimages in Europe (Santiago of Compostela, the Christian-Muslim pilgrimage of Seven Sleepers in Brittany) and in North Africa (Daour of Regraga, Morocco). Over the past eight years, he has studied several cases of shared sacred spaces in the Holy Land (the tombs of Jesus, Mary, Rachel, David, and others, and the Abraham Path), in Syria (Mar Musa Monastery), in Turkey (Ephesus, Büyükada Island), in Tunisia (Ghriba Synagogue), and in Greece (Crete, Thessaly), among other sites.
His latest publications include Coexistences, co-edited by Diogini Albera (Actes Sud, 2017); “Muslim Pilgrims in Brittany: Pilgrimage, Dialogue and Paradoxes,” in R. J. Natvig and I. Flaskerud (eds.), Muslim Pilgrimages in Europe (Routledge, 2017); “The Seven Sleepers Pilgrimage in Brittany: Ambiguity of a Christian-Muslim Heterotopia,” in A. Hobart et T. Zarcone (eds.), Pilgrimages and Ambiguity: Sharing the Sacred (Sean Kingston Publishing, 2017); Lieux saints partagés, co-edited by Diogini Albera and I. Marquette (Actes Sud, 2015); “Muslim Pilgrims at the House of Mary in Ephesus,” in M. Mignone (ed.), The Idea of the Mediterranean (Stony Brooks, 2017); and Le réveil des Sept Dormants (Cerf, 2016).
He is one of the curators of the touring exhibition Shared Sacred Sites held at the Museum of Mediterranean and European Civilizations in Marseille (Mucem, 2015), the Bardo Museum in Tunis (2016), the Macedonian Museum of Contemporary Art and the National Museum of Photography in Thessaloniki (2017), the National Museum of the History of Immigration in Paris (2017–2018) and the Museum of Confluences-Dar el-Bacha in Marrakesh (2018).
He is also a filmmaker and photographer represented by Le Pictorium Agency.
