31/08/2018
Keynote Speech AICIS 2018 IAIN PALU
DOMINIK M. MÜLER
Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, Germany
Dominik M. Müller is the Head of the DFG Emmy Noether Research Group ‘The Bureaucratization of Islam and its Socio-legal Dimensions in Southeast Asia’, which is based at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle. He also holds a Post-Doctoral Scholarship from the Daimler and Benz Foundation (2018–2020, project “Social Categorization and Religiously Framed State-Making in Southeast Asia”), and a non-resident Research Fellowship at the Center for Asian Legal Studies, National University of Singapore (2017-2020). He has recently been a stipendiary Visiting Fellow at Harvard University’s “Islamic Legal Studies Program: Law and Social Change” (2018).
Before joining the MPI, he was a post-doctoral researcher within the Cluster of Excellence ‘Formation of Normative Orders’ at Goethe-University Frankfurt (2012–2016) and a PhD student at the same institute (2008–2012). He studied anthropology, law and philosophy in Frankfurt and Leiden (ERASMUS) from 2003 to 2008.
His PhD thesis (summa cumlaude) on the rise of pop-Islamism in Malaysia received the Frobenius Society’s Research Award for the best anthropological dissertation submitted at a German University in 2012 and was published by Routledge in 2014 under the title Islam, Politics and Youth in Malaysia: The Pop-Islamist Reinvention of PAS. An article on the same topic received a Commendation from the peer-reviewed journal Indonesia and the Malay World (University of London, SOAS) in its Young Scholar Competition 2014. He received the John A. Lent Prize 2018 from the Association for Asian Studies (AAS) for a paper presented at the AAS 2017 Conference outlining the Emmy Noether project’s approach.
Since completing his PhD, Müller has also held short-term visiting positions at Stanford University (2013), the University of Brunei Darussalam (2014), the University of Oxford (2015), and the National University of Singapore (2016). He has taught anthropology courses in Frankfurt, Mainz Heidelberg, Halle and Leipzig. In 2016 he was appointed as a member of the Junge Akademie | Mainz. His research has been published in such peer-reviewed journals as Asian Survey, Globalizations, Indonesia and the Malay World, South East Asia Research, Paideuma: Mitteilungen für Kulturkunde, Internationales Asien forum: International Quarterly for Asian Studies, the Journal of Contemporary Southeast Asian Affairs, the Cambridge Journal of Law and Religion (forthcoming), and in the Encyclopedia of Islam. He is the editor of Berita, the official publication of the AAS’ Malaysia/Singapore/Brunei Studies Group (MSB).
His publications cover a wide range of topics related to Islam, politics and sociocultural transformations in Southeast Asia. He is also keenly interested in trans-regional perspectives, and intends to extend his work on the anthropology of beureaurcrasy and the state beyond Southeast Asia (especially to Europe) in the future.
