Notes on Contributors

Christoph Baumgartner

is associate professor of Ethics at the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies, Utrecht University. His main research areas include political philosophy of religious diversity, freedom of religion, toleration, political secularism, democracy, citizenship in post-migrant societies, environmental ethics, and ethics of climate change.

Erik Meinema

is a lecturer in religious studies at the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at Utrecht University. His research focuses on religious diversity, youth, and political secularism in East Africa. He is a member of the research group Religious Matters in an Entangled World that is led by Birgit Meyer and has conducted his Ph.D. research on the coexistence between Christians, Muslims, and followers of indigenous African religious traditions in the coastal region of Kenya. He has published peer-reviewed articles in journals such as Religion, Africa, and the Journal of Religion in Africa.

Birgit Meyer

is professor of religious studies at Utrecht University. Trained as a cultural anthropologist, she studies religion from a material and postcolonial angle, seeking to synthesize grounded fieldwork and theoretical reflection in a multidisciplinary setting. Her research is driven by an urge to make sense of the shifting place and role of religion in our time, and to show that scholarly work in the field of religion is of eminent concern to understand the shape of our world in the early 21st century. Characteristic of her work is her engagement with the corporeal, material, and political-aesthetic dimensions of religion from an anthropological perspective. Visual culture and religious images and objects play a central role in her work. Awarded with the ‘Academy professor prize’ and the ‘Spinoza prize’ in 2015, Meyer initiated the comprehensive research programme Religious Matters in an Entangled World (www.religiousmatters.nl) which she currently is conducting.

Daan F. Oostveen

is a philosopher and a scholar of religion working at the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies of the Faculty of Humanities of Utrecht University. His Ph.D. on multiple religious belonging was awarded by the Faculty of Religion and Theology at VU Amsterdam. For this research, he spent a year as a research fellow at the People’s University of China in Beijing to study contemporary Chinese religious diversity in 2018. He is a founding member of the New European Humanities in the 21st Century Network (neh21.net), and Editor-in-Chief of the journal Future Humanities. His research interests include the new humanities, comparative religion, and posthumanism.

Younes Saramifar

is assistant professor at the Faculty of Humanities, Free University Amsterdam. As an anthropologist, he focuses on material expressions of religion at the intersection of humans and other than humans in conflict ridden regions. He has done ethnographical research in various conflicts in the Middle East and Central Asia. He has published on the culture of martyrdom, Iranian revolutionary youth, and the materiality of combat. He has recently published Hope, Messiah and troubles of messianic futures in Iran: exploring martyrdom and politics of hope amongst the Iranian revolutionary youth in the British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies.

Joram Tarusarira

is an assistant professor of religion, conflict and peacebuilding at the University of Groningen, the Netherlands. His research focuses on religion, conflict transformation, peacebuilding, reconciliation and religion, and climate induced conflicts.

Margaretha A. van Es

works as an assistant professor of religious studies at Utrecht University. She has conducted research on anti-Muslim sentiments in Europe for over ten years. Her monograph Stereotypes and Self-Representations of Women with a Muslim Background: The Stigma of Being Oppressed was published with Palgrave Macmillan in 2016. She has published articles in international journals such as Religion, Ethnic and Racial Studies, Journal of Muslims in Europe, Religions, and Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power. Her current research focuses on the emergence of trendy, alcohol-free halal restaurants in Rotterdam through the lens of cosmopolitanism and belonging.

Lucien van Liere

is associate professor of religion at the Faculty of Humanities, Utrecht University. He has worked as a lecturer at Sekolah Tinggi Teologi Jakarta (2000–2007). His focus is on the wide socio-cultural context in which violence is committed and justified. He studies how religious beliefs impact the course of conflicts by using methods such as frame analysis, discourse analysis, and material analysis. He uses relational models and network analysis to understand how violence is related to communal ideas about equality, authority, and justice. His further research interest includes the secular state, discourses on martyrdom, and nostalgia. Together with Martha Frederiks he is chief editor of Exchange.

Tammy Wilks

is a doctoral candidate in the Department for the Study of Religions, University of Cape Town. Her research examines the practices and discourses that religious communities in Nairobi perform and narrate to claim belonging to the city.