Abdoolkarim Vakil is a Lecturer in the departments of History and of Languages, Literatures and Cultures at King’s College London. A former head of Department of the Department of Portuguese & Brazilian Studies, he has served on the editorial boards of the journals Portuguese Studies, Journal of Romance Studies, and ReOrient: Journal of Critical Muslim Studies. Abdoolkarim is a member of the Executive Boards of the multi-stranded ReOrient Critical Muslim Studies venture, and of IISRA, the International Islamophobia Studies and Research Association.

Research Interests and PhD Supervision

• Portuguese Intellectual and Cultural History, 19th and 20th centuries
• Nationalism and National Identity and related political ideologies and movements
• Historical Commemorations, Heritage and collective memory
• European Colonial Relations with Islam and Muslims and Contemporary Muslim communities in Europe
• Critical Muslim Studies, Islamophobia, Muslimness, and the racialisation of Muslims

I welcome research students with an interest in any of these or related areas.

Teaching

Over the years I have convened and taught across a range of introductory and survey modules in Portuguese, European and World History, History & Memory and Historical Methods, and specialist modules in Portuguese political, social, intellectual and cultural history, 19th and 20th centuries (including dedicated modules on nationalism and national identity, Oliveira Martins and the Generation of 1870); Lusophone African Literature (with a focus on colonial and post-colonial Mozambique), and the History of Muslims in Europe. Since its inception I have convened/co-convened the Global Iberias curriculum which pioneered a new approach to the teaching of the Spanish and Portuguese-speaking worlds at King's.

Expertise and public engagement

Islamophobia, Muslims in Portugal

Selected publications

• ‘Questões Inacabadas: Colonialismo, Islão e Portugalidade’, in Margarida Calafate Ribeiro and Ana Paula Ferreira eds., Fantasmas e Fantasias Imperiais no Imaginário Português Contemporâneo (Campo das Letras, 2003);
• Thinking Through Islamophobia: Global Perspectives (Hurst, 2010), co-edited with Salman Sayyid;
• Moçambique: Memória Falada do Islão e da Guerra (Almedina, 2011), with Fernando Amaro Monteiro and Mário Artur Machaqueiro
• Al-Andalus in Motion: Travelling Concepts and Cross-Cultural Contexts (Boydell & Brewer, 2021), co-edited with Rachel Scott and Julian Weiss;
• 'The Grammar of Islamophobia’ with S. Sayyid, in Salman al-Azami ed., Media Language on Islam and Muslims: Terminology and Effects (Palgrave, 2023).