Academic staff

  • Dr Margreet van Es (Programme Coordinator)

    Margreet van Es is an Assistant Professor of Religious Studies and one of the Programme Coordinators of the Religious Studies' programme. Her research combines social history and sociology with the anthropology of religion. Having critically analyzed anti-Muslim sentiments in Europe for many years, she currently focuses on the relationship between religious diversity, food practices, social mobility, cosmopolitanism, and belonging.

  • Dr Pooyan Tamimi Arab (Programme Coordinator)

    Pooyan Tamimi Arab is an Assistant Professor of Religious Studies and Programme Coordinator of the Religous Studies' programme. He combines anthropology and art history with political philosophy, focusing on religious tolerance and political secularism.

  • Prof. Christian Lange

    Christian Lange is Professor of Arabic and Islamic Studies. His main areas of interest are classical Islamic law, theology and mysticism. After having researched Islamic notions of paradise and hell for several years, he is currently directing a research project on the history of the senses in Islamic societies.

  • Prof. Birgit Meyer

    Birgit Meyer is Professor of Religious Studies at Utrecht 木瓜福利影视. She has conducted anthropological and historical research on Christianity in Ghana since the late 1980s. Next to this, she has worked on conceptual issues in the interface of anthropology and religious studies, focusing on religion and media, religion and the public sphere, and religion and visual culture. 

  • Dr Christoph Baumgartner

    Christoph Baumgartner is Associate Professor of Ethics. His main areas of interest are politics of religious diversity in liberal democracies, freedom of religion, citizenship, secularism, blasphemy, and ethical and religious issues with respect to non-human nature and the climate catastrophe.

  • Dr Katja Rakow

    Katja Rakow is Associate Professor for Religious Studies. She is interested in transformation and innovation processes within religious traditions and has worked on religion and transcultural encounters (Tibetan Buddhism in the West) and religion and technology (Evangelical megachurches in the US and Singapore). Her current research focuses on the materialities of religious texts and textual practices.

  • Dr Itamar Ben Ami

    Itamar Ben Ami is Assistant Professor at the Department of Religious Studies and Philosophy at Utrecht 木瓜福利影视. He is interested, first, in the tense encounter of theology with politics in late modernity, and, second, in a critical genealogy of the foundations of modernity through the lenses of religious traditions. Itamar has published on the Jewish Ultra-Orthodoxy and its relations to broader discourses around theology and secularism in the 20th century, and he is currently working on two book projects, one on the emergence of Ultra-Orthodox political theology, and the second on the Jewish visibility and belonging in modernity. Itamar is a graduate of the Ultra-Orthodox Yeshiva world.

  • Dr Lucien van Liere

    Lucien van Liere is Associate Professor of Religious Studies. He has worked in Indonesia from 2000-2007. His main area of research is the wide interdisciplinary field of religion, conflict, and violence. Currently he works on a project (with Dr Erik Meinema) on the meaning of weapons.

  • Dr Joas Wagemakers

    Joas Wagemakers is interested in the intellectual history of modern Islam, with a focus on theological and political thinking among Islamists. Wagemakers' research has concentrated on Salafism and particularly Salafi ideology; the Muslim Brotherhood; citizenship, women's rights and Shiites' rights in Saudi Arabia; and Hamas. Geographically, his interests lie mostly in Jordan, Saudi Arabia and the Palestinian territories, although he also spends time reading international Jihadi-Salafi discourse. 

  • Dr Eric Ottenheijm

    Eric Ottenheijm is an Associate Professor of Jewish Studies and Biblical Studies. His prime interest is the way religious identities are formed in Late Antique entanglements of textual, material, and political dimensions. His main research is on Parables in Christian and Rabbinic sources, Rabbinic literature, and the Gospel of Matthew.

  • Dr Erik Meinema

    Erik Meinema is a lecturer in Religious Studies. His main areas of interest are religious diversity, political secularism, and youth culture, with a particular regional focus on East Africa. He has conducted extensive anthropological research on religious coexistence in the coastal region of Kenya.

  • Dr G枚k莽en Beyinli-Din莽

    G枚k莽en Beyinli-Din莽 is a Marie Sk艂odowska-Curie Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Utrecht 木瓜福利影视. She holds a PhD in History from Humboldt 木瓜福利影视-Berlin (2017) and an MA in History from Istanbul Bilgi 木瓜福利影视. She is the author of two books on the history of midwifery and 鈥渇olk religion鈥 in Turkish modernity, as well as several articles on the gender and religious history of Istanbul and modern Turkey. She has a keen interest in postcolonial and 鈥済lobal religious history,鈥 as well as a lived and material approach to religion, which she developed during her postdoctoral studies. She is currently engaged in further research into the history of religion in Turkey and the Ottoman Empire along this line of inquiry.