Daan Oostveen

Since a young age, I have been passionate about religious, literary, social, artistic, political, philosophical, and holistic imaginations of our collective lifeworld.

At the Institute for Cultural Inquiry, I am working on the World Humanities Report, coordinating the European Humanities Network in the 21st (EHN21) under the supervision of Rosi Braidotti, and funded by the Volkswagen Foundation. In Utrecht, we work on the emergence of the New Humanities in Europe and on the Medical Humanities.

At the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies, I teach or have taught the courses Ethics and Religion; Religion and Conflict and Religion; Human Rights and Tolerance; Introduction to Religious Studies; Religion in the Netherlands. Also, I organize a postgraduate tutorial on Rhizomatic Religion.

I hold an MA in Philosophy and an MA in Comparative Literature from Ghent University. I specialized in violence, ethics, and comparative philosophy. I hold a Ph.D. on the topic of "multiple religious belonging" from the Faculty of Theology and Religion of VU Amsterdam, which was part of the Dutch Research Council's program "Religion in Modern Society" which ran from 2012 - 2018. I completed my Ph.D. under the supervision of André van der Braak and Manuela Kalsky.

In 2018 I spent a year as a Research Fellow at Renmin University of China in Beijing, funded by the Confucius Institute, under the supervision of Xinzhong Yao and Cathy Zhang.

Board member of the Bond der Oudleden van 't Zal Wel Gaan, the freethinker's student fraternity of Ghent; Vice-chair of the Libbrechtgenootschap, which manages the legacy of comparative philosopher Ulrich Libbrecht; Former Board member of the Netherlands School for Advanced Study in Theology and Religion (NOSTER).

Specialties and interests include hermeneutics of religious diversity, critical theory, transversal posthumanities, deconstruction, Nietzsche, Spinoza, Buddhism, Daoism, comparative philosophy, new spiritualities, and psychedelics studies.

Research areas

• IOS - Gender, Diversity and Global Justice

Areas of expertise

• Philosophy
• Religious Studies
• Hermeneutics
• Critical Theory
• Posthumanism