Profile

Pooyan Tamimi Arab is an assistant professor at the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies and coordinator of the Research Master's program in Religious Studies. He is a member of the Young Academy of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences. 

Pooyan studies religion through a materialist lens and specializes in secular studies. He combines disciplines such as religious studies, art history, anthropology, and sociology with political philosophy to better understand secular-religious dynamics. He is the principal investigator of the Vidi project Iran's Secular Shift: A Mixed Methods Approach to Nonreligion and Atheism in an Islamic Republic (2025-2030). One of the subprojects is carried out with GAMAAN - The Group for Analyzing and Measuring Attitudes in Iran. Their latest publication is a survey-based analysis of secularization, diversity, and dissidence in Iranian society, published by the French think tank Fondapol.