Meeting the new board: An interview with Pooyan Tamimi Arab
Through these interviews we would like to introduce our new CUCo board members to you. Therefore, this is the third interview in a series of 4. Interviews with the other board members will be released at a rate of 1 per week.
Please tell us a little bit about yourself. How did you end up at UU, and how did you end up at CUCo?
After high school I began studying physics and astronomy at the University of Amsterdam, but I felt strongly drawn to the humanities. I soon decided to switch to art history. That may sound like a radical switch, but in my mind physics and art history are poles of an ultimately theoretical interest in nature and humankind. I like it that CUCo’s premise seems to be the disruption of subject/object and nature/culture dichotomies.
I loved art history but still felt that something was lacking. I found what I had been looking for in philosophy, and soon learned that one needs knowledge of several other disciplines to be able to do philosophy at all. It really isn’t possible to be a good philosopher of science without knowledge of actual sciences. It isn’t possible to do political philosophy without understanding something of history, law, or political economy. My research interests became more politicized in New York, where I got my MA in Philosophy at the New School for Social Research. I wanted to study the relation between religion and politics but realized that I knew little about either. If I wanted to do political philosophy, I thought, I need to dive into other disciplines. That’s what brought me to the anthropology of religion and interdisciplinary studies of the separation of church and state during my PhD at Utrecht University. And so, I eventually ended up becoming an assistant professor at Utrecht’s Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies.
Why join CUCo? I feel at home in my department, but I also appreciate the opportunity to zoom out a bit again and to learn more about developments in other disciplines. So, joining CUCo is doing that for me; the same goes for taking on roles within the Utrecht Young Academy and De Jonge Akademie. These groups allow members to think about science and society not just from their unique disciplinary perspectives, but to think more in terms of collaboration and to consider the university more as a whole. That, and I guess the experimental attitude, is what drew me to CUCo.
So you’re already answering this but, what drew you to CUCo?
I was drawn to CUCo because it’s the kind of place that facilitates an omnivorous interest in science. But if I’m more specific, what I really like about CUCo from the perspective of the humanities is the fact that we are challenged to step outside of the humanities conceived insularly. CUCo doesn’t just ask me to step out of the humanities. The point is to incorporate knowledge from other faculties into the humanities. This requires an open-minded attitude, and personally I have positive experiences with the kind of research of which you couldn’t say in advance whether it would succeed.
Would you consider yourself an interdisciplinarian?
Yes. I am currently doing research with a political scientist based in Tilburg. His academic background is in mechanical engineering and he then moved to quantitative political science and sociology methods. We wrote a journal article together (in review right now), which brings together religious studies, anthropology, political science, and statistical analysis methods. We are also good friends and are in constant communication and have frank, critical conversations about co-authored work. It’s not always easy to find the right match, the right people to work with, but stepping outside one’s disciplinary comfort zone is in the end worth it.
So, do you think that makes you an unusual researcher?
I hesitate to say “Yes, I am unusual.” That’s because I attribute value to being unusual. I see it as a badge of honor, and I don’t want to give myself a badge of honor. We should appreciate unusual researchers, and we should love and accommodate quirky people and their quirky interests.
CUCo is part of an alliance of TU/e, WUR, UU and UMC Utrecht. How do you feel about that?
The alliance prioritizes research on preventive health and the circular society. For CUCo that means that there is a constellation, which isn’t entirely fixed, of disciplines that are drawn to each other. I am thinking of relating technology, society, medicine, and political philosophy. From a humanities perspective, it means that the current constellation of disciplines allows interaction with people who are doing things that are important for the humanities but that are not the humanities. After all, thinking about health and the environment are and should be central concerns of humanities scholars.
Final question; most important one. What’s your favorite animal.
My favorite animal?! My favorite is not very CUCo representative... It is … a sloth! Well, honestly I don’t know if I really have one, but I tell my daughter that the sloth is my favorite animal because she thinks that’s a hilarious choice and likes to make fun of me for identifying with it. laughter
Pooyan Tamimi Arab
Assistant Professor– Utrecht University
Pooyan Tamimi Arab is an assistant professor at the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies and a member of the Utrecht Young Academy and De Jonge Akademie. He combines social scientific approaches to religious studies with political philosophy to think about normative concepts such as religious tolerance, neutrality, and public reason. Tamimi Arab received a Veni-grant for a study of Islam and contested visual culture in 2018 and takes part in the broader research project “Religious Matters in an Entangled World: Things, Food, Bodies, and Texts as Entry Points to the Material Study of Religion in Plural Settings.” Tamimi Arab likes to hang out with quirky people and generally loves the tentacular approach to learning. In recent years he rekindled his passion for numbers by dabbling in statistical approaches to measuring religiosity, for which he was awarded a KNAW Early Career Partnership grant in 2021. A longstanding interest in the philosophy of Benedictus de Spinoza brings some order to his thinking by joining a naturalistic worldview with the humanities’ interpretive understanding of religion and politics.