Marie Juul Petersen is a Ph.D. student at the Institute for Regional and Cross-cultural Studies, University of Copenhagen, Denmark.
Marie has a Master's Degree in Sociology of Religion with supplementary courses in Latin American Studies, African Studies, Post Colonial Studies and Minority Studies. Throughout her studies, her main area of interest has been religion and development, and she wrote her thesis on religious NGOs in the UN system.

After her Masters studies, she has worked as a research assistant at the Danish Institute for International Studies, where she recently finished a one-year research project on Islam and civil society in Jordan and Egypt, including three months of fieldwork in Amman.
She started her Ph.D. studies in October 2007, writing on Muslim NGOs and development, with a particular focus on the educational activities of these NGOs.

Apart from studying, Marie has worked in several Danish NGOs, including Save the Children, Red Cross and the Danish Institute for Human Rights.