Dr Daan Beekers

Postdoctoral Fellow

Dr Daan Beekers

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Postdoctoral Fellow, October 2018 - July 2019

Project: Religious Diversity beyond the Migration Lens: Toward an Ethnography of Muslim‐Christian Coexistence

My research is concerned with questions of religious pluralism, religious commitment and heritage in Europe, with a focus on Christianity and Islam. I studied social and cultural anthropology in Amsterdam and Oxford, and conducted my PhD research at VU Amsterdam on religious commitment among young Protestant Christians and Sunni Muslims in the Netherlands. As a postdoctoral researcher at Utrecht University, I examined the abandonment and repurposing of church buildings in the Netherlands, looking specifically at the interreligious interactions and discourses on heritage that these give rise to. My publications include the co-edited volume Straying from the Straight Path and I have been involved in the production of the (digital) exhibition The Urban Sacred.

My project at IASH focuses on further developing a comparative ethnographic approach to Muslim-Christian coexistence in Europe. Seeking to move beyond longstanding boundaries that have tended to divide research on Islam and Christianity, I explore the everyday interactions between, and potential common ground among, Muslims and Christians in today’s highly interconnected world. Next to finalizing a monograph on the everyday religious lives of young Muslims and Christians in today’s predominantly secular Dutch society, I aim to develop new research on Muslim-Christian interactions in European cities, including Edinburgh.

For a list of my publications please see my Academia page.

Latest blogs:
Converted Churches: Matters of Entanglement, Heritage and Home, Religious Matters in an Entangled World website.
Rethinking difference: Muslim and Christian lives in comparative perspective, LSE Religion and Global Society blog (with Hansjörg Dilger and Daniel Nilsson DeHanas).