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Research Interests
Political Anthropology; Islam; Normative Change; Popular Culture; Human Rights; Minorities; Decision-Making; Magic/Sorcery

Research Area(s)
Southeast Asia (esp. Brunei, Malaysia, Singapore)

Profile       

Dominik M. Müller has been appointed Professor of Cultural and Social Anthropology at Friedrich-Alexander-University Erlangen-Nuremberg (FAU) in November 2019. He continues working with the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology as a cooperation partner. 

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 was based at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle from 2016 until 2019. Following his appointment at FAU Erlangen-Nuremberg, the project moved to FAU but remains affiliated with the MPI. Dominik Müller also holds a grant from the Daimler and Benz Foundation (2018–20). He has been a stipendiary Fellow at Harvard University's "Islamic Legal Studies Program: Law and Social Change" (ILSP: LSC, spring term 2018) and at its successor, the Program on Law and Society in the Muslim World (PLS, spring term 2019). 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 on the rise of pop-Islamism in Malaysia received the Frobenius Society’s Research Award 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 journal Indonesia and the Malay World in its Young Scholar Prize competition 2014. He received the John A. Lent Prize 2018 from the Association for Asian Studies (AAS). In 2019, the Emmy Noether Project was positively evaulated (Zwischenevaluation, 2016–2019)

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). His research has been published in such peer-reviewed journals as Asian Survey, GlobalizationsIndonesia and the Malay WorldSouth East Asia Research, Paideuma: Mitteilungen zur Kulturkunde,  International Quarterly for Asian Studies, the Journal of Current Southeast Asian Affairs, and the Journal of Law and Religion. He is the editor of Berita, the official publication of the AAS' Malaysia/Singapore/Brunei Studies Group. 

His publications cover a wide range of topics related to Islam, politics and socio-cultural transformations in Southeast Asia. He is also keenly interested in transregional and comparative perspectives, and intends to extend his work beyond Southeast Asia in the future.

https://uni-erlangen.academia.edu/DominikMüller 

Why Law & Anthropology?

I am fascinated by the phenomenon of normative change and how different forms of normativity, including formalized and non-formalized ones, interact and are socially (re-)produced – particularly when it comes to religious truth claims that are presented as unchanging and eternal by some involved actors. The methodological and epistemic foci of anthropology are most suitable for investigating such socio-legal and political questions, especially in the ‘messy’ realities of everyday life that interest me most.

In my view, as academic disciplines, law and anthropology can benefit greatly from transdisciplinary exchange; unfortunately, this endeavour is still rarely pursued. The Department of Law and Anthropology at the MPI is a genuine trailblazer in pushing this project forward, which makes it an exciting place for me to conduct my research on the bureaucratization of Islam in Southeast Asia.

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