Selina Bloch joined the Institute of Social Anthropology at the University of Basel as an Assistant in 2024, and is currently developing her doctoral research project.Based on ethnographic fieldwork in Tajikistan, her project aims to research how love circulates in everyday life and culture in Tajikistan. From maternal love and love of the motherland to longing for the family, village or city while living abroad, love is central to everyday experiences and ideas of a good life. Love as a signifier attaches itself to material forms - poetry, food, landscapes, clothing - and is circulated through media such as television, social media and public rituals such as Nowruz or Independence Day. In her dissertation, she asks, what role love plays in Tajik culture and the everyday, and how it shapes - and is shaped by - notions of belonging.

Selina holds both a Bachelor's and a Master's degree in Religious Studies and Ethnology from the University of Zurich. As part of her Master's studies, she spent two semesters at Utrecht University in the Netherlands during 2022 and 2023, supported by a mobility scholarship from the University of Zurich through the Swiss-European Mobility Programme (SEMP). Her Master's thesis, titled "Navigating Aid: Ethnography of Religious NGOs in Tajikistan", was awarded the Alumni Prize from the Faculty of Theology and Religious Studies, as well as the Semester Prize for outstanding semester papers from the University of Zurich in 2024 as well as the Fritz-Stolz award 2025 of the Swiss Society for the Study of Religion. In 2020, she received a scholarship from the Mercator Foundation for a language stay at the Dehkhoda Lexicon Institute in Tehran, Iran. 

Selina is a member of the Swiss Society for Religious Studies (SGR-SSSR) and the Central Eurasia Studies Society.

• Tajikistan
• Germany

• Fall Semester 2024: Introduction to Academic Work in Religious Studies (Department of Religious Studies, University of Zurich)
• Spring Semester 2022: Ethnological Research Methods (Department of Social Anthropology and Cultural Studies, University of Zurich)
• Fall Semester 2021: Introduction to Scientific Work (Department of Social Anthropology and Cultural Studies, University of Zurich)

• Spring Semester 2024: Research Assistant to Prof. Dr. Dorothea Lüddeckens, Chair of Religious Studies with a Social Science Orientation.
• Fall Semester 2021 – Spring Semester 2022: Research Assistant for the project "Spiritual Healing and Spirit Healing in Japan and Switzerland" project lead Prof. Dr. Dorothea Lüddeckens, University of Zürich and Prof. Dr. Monika Schrimpf, University of Tübingen
• 2020-2022: Tutor for the Chair of Prof. Dr. Johannes Quack, focusing on Anthropology of Religion, Medicine, Knowledge (Trans)Formation, and Ethics.