Kun Akaabir

Born 1982 in Purwokerto/Indonesia.

Kun Akaabir lives and works in Purwokerto/Indonesia. He studied law at the Faculty of Shariah and Law at the State Islamic University of Sunan Kalijaga and earned his BA in 2007. He finished his master’s studies at the Faculty of Humanities at Leiden University, Netherlands with an MA degree in Islamic Studies majoring in anthropology of Muslim societies (2011). His MA thesis was recently published in the book Islam, Ethnicity, and Nationalism: Discourse on cultural integration among Arab women in Indonesia by Yogyakarta.

In addition to teaching Islamic law and anthropology of Islam at Jenderal Soedirman University Indonesia, he is one of the associate editors of the Kawalu Journal of Local Culture. Previously, he was a researcher at Etnohistori, a research cluster concerned with the anthropological and historical studies on Indonesia. His doctoral study at the Faculty of Behavioral and Cultural Studies at Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg will be exploring the cultural dynamics of local religions and belief systems in rural areas in Indonesia in the context of the politics of religion and the proliferation of Islamic radicalism in the country.

Kun Akaabir has received several grants and awards such as the Netherlands’ »Indonesia’s Young Leaders« full scholarship for MA studies (2010–2011), Supersemar Award for Undergraduate Scientific Works (2007), and Research Grants from the Indonesian Ministry of Religious Affairs for research and excursion at the Rheinische-Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn, Germany and Leiden University (2007).