Studies, research, academic work

Academia is no longer my day job, but I try to keep a toehold. My background is in religiology.¹ I’ve mostly dabbled in Islamic studies, intersecting with Balkan studies and human rights, but I’m interested in a little bit of everything at the intersection of religion and politics.

I have also done a bit of “applied” religiology, working with colleagues on how religion can hinder or promote human rights, whether by helping to foreground Muslim reformist thought, consulting on religious opposition to SRHR policies or evaluating a religious peace project.

I am a founding member of the Slovenian Association for the Study of Religions (SASR), a member of ISORECEA and an active participant in various initiatives and networks including

• the Oslo Coalition on Freedom of Religion or Belief (especially the New Directions in Islamic Thought project)
• the EASR Working Group on Religion in Public Education
• the Center for Religion and Politics (formerly the RelPol Initiative) at the Department of Culture Studies and Oriental Languages, University of Oslo (informally, and as circumstances permit)

Here are some things you can read:

• A list of my international publications
• See also my separate pages for publications in Slovene and Norwegian
• More detail about my books

Current interests include (in no particular order):

• Islam and the rights of the child
• The radical religious right in the gender backlash
• Religious territorialism
• Religion in the Russian-Ukrainian war
• National myths of origin
• Human rights as a research and teaching topic in religiology
• Cults of rationality, progress and technology
• The religiological study of werewolves (here be actual monsters)