Sindre Bangstad

I am a social anthropologist and a Research Professor or Forsker I at KIFO (Institute For Church, Religion And Worldview Research) in Oslo, Norway. From August 2021, I am also a Research Associate (Forsker II) at Arkivet and Platform in Kristiansand, Norway. I have been appointed as the Stanley Kelley Jr. Distinguished Visiting Professor in the Teaching of Anthropology at Princeton University from Sept 2022  through to June 2023.  Previously, I was affiliated with the Faculty of Theology at the University of Oslo in Norway from 2013 to 2015. From 2010 to 2013, I was a post-doctoral fellow at the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Oslo in Norway, where I held a post-doctoral fellowship funded by the Norwegian Research Council (NRC) from 2010 to 2013. My alma mater was the University of Bergen in Norway, where I received my cand.polit degree in social anthropology in 2002. From 2003 to 2007 I was affiliated with the now defunct International Institute for the Study of Islam in the Modern World (ISIM) in Leiden, The Netherlands, where I did my PhD, published by Amsterdam University Press under the title 'Global Flows, Local Appropriations: Facets of Secularisation and Re-Islamisation Among Contemporary Muslims in Cape Town, South Africa' under the supervision of Professor Abdulkader Tayob, then at Radboud University in Nijmegen, presently at University of Cape Town, South Africa. Since then I have published an award-winning academic monograph on comparative secularisms entitled 'Sekularismens Ansikter' ['The Faces of Secularism'] in Norwegian on Universitetsforlaget (2009) and in a Swedish translation at Studentliteratur (2012). In 2009, I initiated a series in public anthropology funded by the Norwegian Fritt Ord Foundation and taking place at the House of Literature in the Norwegian capital of Oslo twice a year. The series, in which a number of distinguished international scholars of anthropology and related disciplines featured,  was published as 'Anthropology Of Our Times: An Edited Anthology in Public Anthropology (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017). In 2014, I published 'Anders Breivik And The Rise Of Islamophobia' (Zed Books, Chicago University Press), which was reviewed in London Review of Books and the New York Review of Books (2014), as well as in American Ethnologist (2015). The following year, 'The Politics Of Mediated Presence: Exploring The Voices Of Muslims in Norway's Mediated Public Spheres' was published by Scandinavian Academic Press (2015) and 'Hva er rasisme?' ('What is racism?'), which I co-authored with Cora Alexa Døving was published by Universitetsforlaget (2015). I am a regular contributor to Open Democracy, Africa is a Country and the SSRC The Immanent Frame, and have been a columnist for the American Anthropological Association (AAA)'s Anthropology New Online for the year 2017. I feature as one of two anthropologists among the 100 most prolific scholars in Norway from 2010 to 2015. I am also a legal correspondent for the Columbia Global Freedom of Expression Project. In 2019 I was awarded the AIME Award from the American Anthropological Association (AAA) for my work on disseminating anthropological knowledge and insights to wider audiences through the media.
Supervisors: Professor Abdulkader Tayob (UCT, Radboud University), and Professor Anh Nga Longva (University of Bergen)
Phone: +4792870756
Address: KIFO, Institute For Church, Religion and Worldview Research
PO Box 45 Vinderen
NO-0319 Oslo
Norway