Profile

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

Pooyan views religions through a materialist lens and specializes in secular studies. He combines disciplines such as religious studies, art history, 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. Pooyan 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, Pooyan 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.”  Pooyan's Vidi-project Iran's Secular Shift: A Mixed Methods Approach to Nonreligion and Atheism in an Islamic Republic will commence in 2025.