Marie-Claire Foblets is Director at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, where she was Managing Director from July 2015 to January 2021. She is head of the Department of Law & Anthropology, which she founded in 2012. She is also Professor of Law at the Catholic University of Leuven (KUL) and an honorary professor at Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg and the University of Leipzig.
She has been teaching law and social and cultural anthropology at the universities of Antwerp and Brussels for over twenty years. Before becoming a member of the Max Planck Society in March 2012, she was a full-time professor at KUL, where she was head of the Institute for Migration Law and Legal Anthropology. She is a member of many academic networks that focus on research on the application of Islamic law in Europe and on law and migration in Europe, including the Association française d'anthropologie du droit (AFAD), of which she was co-president for several years.
In 2001, Professor Foblets was elected to the Royal Flemish Academy of Belgium for Science and the Arts (KVAB). In 2004, she received the Francqui Prize, the most prestigious academic award in the humanities in Belgium. In 2016 she received an honorary doctorate from the Law Faculty at the Facultés universitaires Saint-Louis, Brussels, Belgium, and in 2019 from the Law Faculty at the University of Uppsala, Sweden. She became a full member of the Saxon Academy of Sciences and Humanities (Philological-Historical Class) in February 2015.