Dr. Pooyan Tamimi Arab

Assistant Professor
Religious Studies
Religious Studies
p.tamimiarab@uu.nl

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.

Tamimi Arab views religions through a materialist lens and specializes in secular studies broadly conceived; he is interested in combining disciplines such as religious studies, anthropology, and sociology with political philosophy, in order to better understand secular-religious dynamics. 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).

Since 2019, Tamimi Arab has been working with survey methods to measure declining religiosity in Iran. His research with GAMAAN - The Group for Analyzing and Measuring Attitudes in Iran - has been widely cited and discussed in media such as New York Magazine, the Wall Street Journal, The Economist, and Iran International. In 2022, GAMAAN was awarded the President’s Medal of the UK's Market Research Society for making an “extraordinary contribution to research.”