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Prof. Dr. Mirjam Künkler

SCAS, Uppsala

Curriculum Vitae

Prof. Dr. Mirjam Künkler studied Political Science, African Studies, Oriental Studies, and Economics at the Universities of Leipzig, Paris (ESC), and Cape Town. In 2008, she earned her Ph.D. at Columbia University, NY, with a dissertation on “Democratization, Islamic Thought, and Social Movements: Coalitional Success and Failure in Iran and Indonesia” under the mentorship of Charles Tilly, Alfred Stepan, and Said Arjomand. Subsequently, Mirjam Künkler taught Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University. She was also a guest professor at the University of Tehran and the Islamic State University of Makassar in Indonesia.
Her research interests include Iranian and Indonesian politics and contemporary history; she has published on the relationship between religion and politics, Islamic political thinking, political parties, as well as legal and constitutional questions in both countries. Her current work focuses on female religious authorities in Islam, and the significance of religion in Iran and Indonesia’s legal systems. In 2013, together with two colleagues, she led a six-month research group on the topic of religion and constitutionalism at the Center for Interdisciplinary Research (ZiF) in Bielefeld, Germany. Along with her colleague Mehrzad Boroujerdi, she founded the Iran Social Science Data Portal, which is the most visited international web portal for social science data on Iran.

From July 2017 to June 2018 Prof. Dr. Mirjam Künkler was Fellow at the Käte Hamburger Center for Advanced Study in the Humanities “Law as Culture”.

Research Project

The Legal System of the Islamic Republic of Iran in Comparative Perspective

During her time at the KHC Bonn, Mirjam Künkler will complete a book on the Islamization of Iran’s legal system following the 1979 Revolution as well as a volume (with Devin Stewart) on female religious scholars in the history of Shiite Islam.

Selected publications

  • Mirjam Künkler, John Madeley and Shylashri Shankar (eds.): A Secular Age Beyond the West. Religion, Law and the State in Asia, the Middle East and North Africa. With an Afterword by Charles Taylor. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Studies in Social Theory, Religion and Politics, 2017.
  • Mirjam Künkler and David Kloos (eds.): Asian Studies Review, special issue on “Studying Female Islamic Authority: From Top-Down to Bottom-Up Modes of Certification,”(Vol. 40 (4), December 2016), pp. 479-599.
  • Mirjam Künkler, Hanna Lerner and Shylashri Shankar (eds.), American Behavioral Scientist, special issue “Constitutionalism in Rough Seas: Balancing Religious Accommodation and Human Rights in, through, and despite, the Law,”60 (8), July 2016, pp. 911–1035.
  • Mirjam Künkler and Alfred Stepan (eds.): Democracy and Islam in Indonesia, (Columbia University Press, 2013). 
  • Yüksel Sezgin and Mirjam Künkler, “Regulation of “Religion” and the “Religious”: The Politics of Judicialization and Bureaucratization in India and Indonesia”, Comparative Studies of Society and History, 2014, Vol. 56(2): 448-478.
  • Mirjam Künkler. “Religion-State Relations and Democracy in Egypt and Tunisia: Models from the Democratizing Muslim World – and their Limits”, in Swiss Political Science Review, Vol. 18, March 2012, 114-119.
  • Mirjam Künkler and Roja Fazaeli, “The life of two mujtahidahs: Female Religious Authority in 20th century Iran” in Women, Leadership and Mosques: Contemporary Islamic Authority, edited by Masooda Bano and Hilary Kalmbach, Brill Publishers, 2011, pp. 127-160.
  • Künkler, Mirjam, “Zum Verhältnis Staat-Religion und der Rolle islamischer Intellektueller in der indonesischen Reformasi” in Stephanie Garling and Simon W. Fuchs (eds.): Religion in Diktatur und Demokratie — Zur Bedeutung von religiösen Werten, Praktiken und Institutionen in politischen Transformationsprozessen. Wuppertal: Villigster Profile, 2008, pp. 84-102.
  • Mirjam Künkler, “Advocating Women’s Rights in the Language of Islamic Sacred Texts. The Tripartite Struggle for Women’s Rights in Iran.” Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs, Vol. 24, 2 2004, 375-392.

Publications - Encyclopedia Entries

  • Künkler, Mirjam, “Muftiyah” Entry in The Oxford Encyclopedia on Islam and Women, Oxford University Press, 2013 (and included at Oxford Islamic Studies Online).
  • Künkler, Mirjam, “Theocracy,” Entry in the Princeton Encyclopedia of Islamic Political Thought, Princeton University Press, 2012.
  • Künkler, Mirjam, “Nosrat Amin” Entry in The Oxford Encyclopedia on Islam and Women,
    Oxford University Press, 2013 (and included at Oxford Islamic Studies Online).
  • Künkler, Mirjam, “Zohreh Sefati” Entry in The Oxford Encyclopedia on Islam and Women, Oxford University Press, 2013 (and included at Oxford Islamic Studies Online).
  • Künkler, Mirjam, “Democracy,” Entry in the Princeton Encyclopedia of Islamic Political Thought, Princeton University Press, 2012.

Online-Publications

Iran Data Portal: http://irandataportal.syr.edu

Principal Investigators: Mirjam Künkler and Mehrzad Boroujerdi.

Funded by the Social Science Research Council (SSRC), Princeton University and Syracuse University. The Iran Social Science Data Portal is an English- and Persian-language internet portal that hosts an array of social science data on Iran, including socioeconomic data, electoral data, information on political parties, translations of selected laws and proposed legal reforms, and synopses of contemporary social science studies published in Iran. The portal’s aim is to contribute to a more empirically-driven engagement with Iran on part of scholars, journalists and policy makers.

Website: https://mirjamkuenkler.com/