Meet the team
Dr Iselin Frydenlund
(Principal Investigator)
Dr Iselin Frydenlund is Professor of Religious Studies at MF Norwegian School of Theology, Religion and Society, and a Fellow of the MF Centre for the Advanced Study of Religion (MF CASR). She specializes in questions relating to Buddhism and its societal impact, focusing on Buddhism, politics, nationalism, and violence in South and Southeast Asia.
Iselin also works on Buddhist-Muslim relations in Buddhist majority states in Asia, exploring contestation as well as peaceful co-existence between Buddhists and Muslims for more than a thousand years. She regularly appears in national and international media on questions related to Buddhism and politics, and frequently provides analysis for policymakers at home and abroad.
Her latest book is Buddhist-Muslim Relations in a Theravada World (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020) co-edited with Michael Jerryson.
Dr Torkel Brekke
Dr Torkel Brekke is Professor at Oslo Metropolitan University, and theme leader on Ideology and Identity at the Center for Research on Extremism (C-REX) at the University of Oslo.
Torkel holds a DPhil in Oriental Studies from the University of Oxford on the politics of religious identities in India during colonial times. His main research focus since then has been the interfaces between religion, culture, and conflict. Among his books are Fundamentalism: Prophecy and Protest in an Age of Globalization (Cambridge University Press, 2012) and Faithonomics: Religion and the Free Market (Hurst & Co., 2016).
He is also Principal Investigator for a large research project about the financial exclusion of Muslims in the Nordic countries based at the Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO).
Dr Cathrine Thorleifsson
Dr Cathrine Thorleifsson is a Researcher at the Center for Research on Extremism (C-REX) at the University of Oslo, specializing in ethnographies of the far (i.e. populist, radical, and extreme) right. Cathrine holds a PhD in Anthropology from the London School of Economics and Political Science. Previously, she was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Oslo.
Cathrine has been researching and writing on nationalism, identity politics, migration, and racisms since the early 2000s. Her recent books include: Nationalist responses to the crises in Europe (Routledge, 2019) and Nationalism and the Politics of Fear in Israel (I.B. Tauris, 2015). Cathrine has studied Arabic at the University of Damascus and Hebrew at the University of Haifa.
In addition to her academic pursuits, Cathrine has carried out consultancy work for the United Nations, the World Bank, the European Commission, and numerous ministries on far-right mobilization. Cathrine frequently provides expert analysis for policy makers as well as print and broadcast media.
Dr Göran Larsson
Dr Göran Larsson is Professor of Religious Studies and Deputy Dean for the Faculty of Humanities, University of Gothenburg. While his research is focused primarily on Islam and Muslims in Europe, he has also written about Islamic theology, Quranic studies, and issues related to religion and media.
Although Göran did his PhD in Religious Studies at the University of Gothenburg, he has also held positions at Uppsala University and Södertörn University, and has been a guest researcher at the University of Leiden in the Netherlands (2004). Between 2011 and 2014, he was affiliated with the Department of Culture Studies and Oriental Languages at the University of Oslo.
His current research is primarily focused on global conflicts and how they impact Swedish society.
Dr Sindre Bangstad
Dr Sindre Bangstad is a Research Professor at KIFO (Institute For Church, Religion And Worldview Research) in Oslo, Norway. A social anthropologist with a background in ethnographic research on Muslims in Cape Town, South Africa and Oslo, Norway, Bangstad has published extensively on racism and Islamophobia, hate speech, and the far-right.
Bangstad is the author of Anders Breivik and the Rise of Islamophobia (Zed Books, 2014), and a regular contributor to various international media outlets and academic websites. In 2019, Bangstad was awarded the Anthropology In The Media Award (AIME) from the American Anthropological Association (AAA) for his long-standing contributions to the dissemination of anthropological knowledge and insights through the media.
Dr Moumita Sen
Dr Moumita Sen is a visual studies scholar and a Postdoctoral Fellow at MF Norwegian School of Theology, Religion and Society, studying the transnational flows of Hindu nationalist ideology.
Her forthcoming monograph, The Mahishasur Movement in India: Caste, Religion, and Politics, is based on her postdoctoral research which focuses on the intersection of aesthetic discourse, popular religiosity, and organized politics in the Mahishasur movement, in which caste minorities in India publicly venerate a “demon” in hegemonic Hindu mythology. Her larger research interest is in the field of Indian visual culture.
Her doctoral dissertation (2016), which she is in the process of turning into a book, studied the practices of clay-modelling in West Bengal, which weave together the worlds of art, religion, and politics. Her dissertation received the Norwegian king’s gold medal for ‘outstanding research’ in 2017.
She is the co-editor of Nine Nights of the Goddess: The Navaratri Festival in South Asia (SUNY, 2018).
Dr Eviane Leidig
Dr Eviane Leidig is a researcher affiliated with INTERSECT. Her research within the project focuses on the role of women in the far right in India and North America. She is a Research Fellow at the International Centre for Counter-Terrorism in The Hague, Netherlands.
Eviane holds a PhD in sociology from the University of Oslo, which explored far right connections between India and the West, particularly through diaspora online networks. During her PhD, Eviane was a VOX-Pol sponsored visiting researcher at the Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford, and the department of Media, Culture and Communication at New York University.
An outward facing researcher, Eviane regularly contributes to international media outlets, and consults for policy makers, tech companies, and civil society organisations. She is an affiliate at the Center for Research on Extremism at the University of Oslo, a founding member of the Centre for Analysis of the Radical Right, as well as an Associate Fellow at the Global Network on Extremism & Technology.
Esther Sarah Tenberg
Esther Tenberg is a PhD candidate at MF Norwegian School of Theology, Religion and Society. Her current research focuses on the discursive power of religious authority in Myanmar Buddhist-protectionist online spaces on Facebook.
She holds a master's degree from the Southeast Asian Studies Department at the University of Bonn, Germany, which she concluded with a dissertation on the relation between Buddhist philosophy, racial and sexual hierarchy and social order. In 2014, Esther completed a DAAD (German Academic Exchange Service) funded one-year proficiency course at the University of Foreign Languages in Yangon.
Her research interests include intersectional identity formations, religious and political discourse, and transnational discursive phenomena. She is vice-president of the Myanmar-Institut, an association of scholars from the DATCH-region (Germany, Austria, Switzerland) working with and on Myanmar, which fosters cooperation and networking and aims at re-establishing Myanmar studies and the study of Myanmar language at a university in that region.
Dr Sami Al-Daghistani
Dr Sami Al-Daghistani (PhD, 2017, Islamic Studies, Leiden University, co-supervision at Columbia University) is a Postdoctoral Fellow at MF Norwegian School of Theology, Religion and Society, an Associate Faculty at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research, and a Research Scholar at the Middle East Institute at Columbia University.
His teaching and research focus on Islamic intellectual history, economic and environmental thought, and Islam and modernity. Sami has published on Islamic economics, edited two books on the Second Gulf War and on Middle Eastern culture, and translated Ibn Battuta’s Rihla and Ibn Tufayl’s Hay ibn Yaqzanin Slovenian.
His forthcoming monographs are Abu Hamid al-Ghazali’s Spiritual Economics (Anthem Press) and The Making of Islamic Economics (Cambridge University Press). He is working on two projects: on the concept of sustainability in classical Islamic milieu, and on the conceptual history of Islamophobia in the Middle East.
Dr Bharath Ganesh
Dr Bharath Ganesh is an Assistant Professor of Media Studies at the Centre for Media and Journalism Studies at the University of Groningen. Bharath’s research focuses on racism, hate, and digital media. With Intersect, Bharath’s current work focuses on the circulation of Islamophobia in transatlantic far right publics online and investigating the role of social media platforms in the spread of Islamophobia and anti-Muslim hate. Bharath’s work contributes theoretical developments in the study of digital hate culture and empirical research on the mobilization of hate in digital publics.
Bharath completed his PhD in Geography at University College London in 2017. He was a postdoctoral researcher at the Oxford Internet Institute from 2017 to 2019, where he contributed to projects on extremism and disinformation. Bharath has a long-standing interest in researching and combating Islamophobia. Prior to completing his PhD, Bharath was a Senior Research at Tell MAMA where he developed key research outputs on anti-Muslim hate crime in the UK and contributed evidence to various UK Parliamentary inquiries on the topic.
Bharath’s research on the far right online, digital hate culture, and the governance of extremism and hate speech can be found in Cultural Studies, Policy & Internet, Journal of European Integration, and the Journal of International Affairs.
Edin Kozaric
Edin Kozaric is a PhD Candidate at the Diversity Studies Centre Oslo (DISCO) at Oslo Metropolitan University. His research focuses on how Muslims in Norway experience, conceptualize and narrate Islamophobia, and how this is impacted by intersecting identities.
Edin holds a master’s degree in Peace and Conflict Studies from the Department of Peace and Conflict Studies at the University of Uppsala. Prior to beginning his PhD, he worked as a research assistant at the Center for Research on Extremism (C-REX) at the University of Oslo. He has also worked on the FINEX-project based at the Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO).