Erik Meinema is an Assistant Professor Religion and Heritage at the department of Philosophy and Religious Studies. His research focuses on religious diversity, youth culture, and political secularism in East Africa. He is a member of the research group 鈥樷�� that is led by Birgit Meyer. He received a Research Talent Grant from the Dutch Research Council (NWO) to conduct his PhD research on the regulation of religious coexistence in coastal Kenya, in which he studied Christianity, Islam, and indigenous African religious traditions within one conceptual framework. His PhD thesis received the biennial Gerardus van der Leeuw PhD Dissertation Award from the Dutch Association for the Study of Religion in 2023. He has (co-)published peer-reviewed articles in journals such as , , the , and the . He is also interested in questions about materiality, religion, and (violent) conflict and has recently published an on this topic with Brill together with Lucien van Liere. Together with Lucien, he also currently works on a project on . From January 2025, he is working on a NWO-funded Veni-project entitled .