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 ‘Religious Matters in an Entangled World’ 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 published peer-reviewed articles in journals such as Religion, Africa, the Journal of Religion in Africa, and the Journal of Eastern African Studies. He is also interested in questions about materiality, religion, and (violent) conflict and has recently published an edited volume on this topic with Brill together with Lucien van Liere. Together with Lucien, he also currently works on a project on The Meaning of  Weapons. In January 2025, he will start with NWO-funded Veni-project entitled Art, Religion, or Heritage? Negotiating Indigenous African Traditions in the Religiously Diverse Context of Coastal Kenya.