Gerardus van der Leeuw Fellows

Professor Frank Heidemann was the first Gerardus van der Leeuw Fellow to be welcomed at the Faculty of Religion, Culture and Society. He is a leading anthropologist and an expert on Indian society at the Ludwig Maximilians University Munich, Germany. His main fields of expertise include Visual Anthropology, Social Aesthetics, Anthropology of the Senses, Postcolonial Studies, Political Anthropology, as well as Anthropological Theory.

During his stay, he taught several classes, including a masterclass.

During his stay as Gerardus van der Leeuw Fellow, Dr Paul Rasor taught the interdisciplinary course Hate Speech, and gave a lecture for the University Colloquium (in collaboration with Studium Generale Groningen). Rasor obtained his PhD at the Harvard Divinity School and holds nearly thirty years of teaching experience in law, theology, and religious studies. Until recently, he was Director of the Centre for the Study of Religious Freedom and Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies at Virginia Wesleyan College in Norfolk, Virginia, USA. He is also member of the International Advisory Board for the Centre for Religion, Conflict, and Globalisation (UG).

Prof. Rosalind I.J. Hackett taught several courses in 2018 within her fields of expertise - namely, religion in African conflicts, gender and Pentecostalism in Africa, African indigenous religions and religious freedom, sound and material religion - and completed numerous writing projects as a result of her fieldresearch on African indigenous religious responses to globalization, notably in terms of festivals, heritage projects, and world music.

Hackett is Distinguished Professor in the Humanities and Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Tennessee, USA. She has also taught in the UK and Nigeria. In the past four decades, she has held fellowships at the University of Aberdeen, the University of Notre Dame, the University of Cape Town, and Harvard Law School, among others. Rosalind has more than nine years of field experience, teaching and researching in Africa. In 2014/2015 she was Visiting Professor in Women’s Studies and Religion at Harvard Divinity School.