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Carool Kersten is Senior Lecturer in the study of Islam and the Muslim World. Before joining King’s College London in 2007, he was a faculty member at the Centre of Graduate and International Studies at Payap University in Chiang Mai (Thailand), where he taught courses on Asian history and religion. Between 2002 and 2005, he also acted as academic director (Thailand) of a US-based non-profit organization facilitating study-abroad programmes in thirteen countries. Prior to that he spent more than ten years working in the Middle East as a human resources manager and translator of Arabic.

He has a PhD in the study of religions from the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London, a Postgraduate Certificate in Academic Practice (PGCAP) from King’s College London, an MA (cum laude) in Arabic Language and Culture from Radboud University Nijmegen (The Netherlands), and a Certificate in Southeast Asian Studies from Payap University in Thailand. During a sabbatical year (1995-96), he did graduate work in philosophy at his Alma Mater in The Netherlands. He is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy and the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland, as well as a Member of the Charted Institute of Linguists in the UK..

Dr Kersten also is a Research Associate of the Centre for South East Asian Studies at SOAS and the editor of the book series Contemporary Thought in the Islamic World for Ashgate Publishing. He serves on the international advisory boards of the Journal of Global and International Studies, Sociology of Islam Journal (Brill), and the Journal of Contemporary Islam in Indonesia.

He maintains a blog called Critical Muslims.

• Contemporary Muslim thought
• Intellectual history of the (post)modern Muslim world
• Islam in global and interregional contexts
• History of Islam in Southeast Asia
• Interdisciplinary approaches to the study of Islam

Currently Carool Kersten is working on two books about Islam in Indonesia. Aside from Islam in Southeast Asia, his key research areas include the intellectual history of the modern Muslim world, contemporary Muslim thinkers, and modern Islam in transnational and global contexts. 

Dr Kersten’s latest Cosmopolitans and Heretics: New Muslim Intellectuals and the Study of Islam appeared in the UK with Hurst & Company and was released in the USA by Columbia University Press. It has been nominated for the AAR Prize for Best First Book in the History of Religions and the Bernard Schwartz Book Award of the Asia Society.

Together with Madawi al-Rasheed and Marat Shterin he edited Demystifying the Caliphate (2012).

He is also the author of two historical travel accounts on Southeast Asia, and has contributed chapters to other edited volumes and articles to scholarly journals in Europe, North America, Asia, and Australia.

For a full bibliography, see the attached document (pdf).

Dr Kersten will be on research leave during the academic year 2012-13.

Dr Kersten is presently supervising nine PhD research students working on subjects related to contemporary Islam and the Muslim World.

He welcomes proposals from prospective students interested in pursuing research on the contemporary Muslim world, especially projects dealing with intellectual history and modern thought in the Arabic-speaking world, Southeast Asia, Turkey, and among Muslims in the West.