Pooyan Tamimi Arab

Assistant Professor of Religious Studies, Utrecht University

Year of birth: 1983

Current position: Assistant Professor of Religious Studies

Past positions: Assistant curator of West-Asia and North-Africa, National Museum of World Cultures, the Netherlands (2016); Postdoctoral researcher, Department of Anthropology, University of Amsterdam (2015).

Personal Profile:

Pooyan Tamimi Arab is an assistant professor at the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies and a member of the Utrecht Young Academy and De Jonge Akademie. Starting 2022/2023, he is the coordinator of the Research Master program in Religious Studies and teaches at UCU and UU about topics such as political secularism, religious tolerance, and material religion. Tamimi Arab’s research combines social scientific approaches to religious studies with political philosophy. He is the author of Amplifying Islam in the European Soundscape (2017), a book about Dutch secularism and the broadcasting of the Islamic call to prayer with loudspeakers, and Why Do Religious Forms Matter? (2022), about materiality and aesthetics in the political writings of Spinoza, Locke, and Rawls. Tamimi Arab co-edited the volume Spinoza’s Theological-Political Treatise (1670–2020): Commemorating A Long-Forgotten Masterpiece (2021) and co-edited The Routledge Handbook of Material Religion (2024).

Recent scholarly papers/books:

  1. Tamimi Arab, P., Hughes, J.S., and Rodríguez-Plate, S. B. (eds.). 2024 (available from September 2023). The Routledge Handbook of Material Religion. London: Routledge.
  2. Tamimi Arab, P. 2022. Why Do Religious Forms Matter? Reflections on Materialism, Toleration, and Public Reason. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
  3. Tamimi Arab, P. 2022. Can Muslims Drink? Rumi Vodka, Persianate Ideals, and the Anthropology of Islam. Comparative Studies in Society and History 64(2): 1-37.

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