Editorial

Martin van Bruinessen

doi:10.33182/ks.v10i1.683

Authors

Martin van Bruinessen University of Utrecht

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.33182/ks.v10i1.683

Keywords:

Kurdish Studies

Abstract

As this journal enters its tenth year, some major changes are taking place in the editorial team. Welat Zeydanlıoğlu, who had first founded the Kurdish Studies Network and moderated its helpful mailing list and then took the initiative to establish this journal in collaboration with our publisher Ibrahim Sirkeci, has announced that he wishes to retire from the position of managing editor. For the past nine years, Welat has given much of his time and energy to the journal, and it is understandable that he wishes to move on now to something else, but we shall certainly miss him. It has been largely due to Welat’s efforts (and his confidence that he could persuade scholars to publish their work in this journal) that Kurdish Studies has managed to stick to a strict schedule of publication, with new issues coming out each spring and autumn, as well as maintaining standards of academic quality. An interview with Welat in this issue (by Marlene Schäfers) documents the role the network and journal have played in the development of Kurdish studies as a coherent field of studies and in stimulating communication between scholars of many different backgrounds.

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Author Biography

Martin van Bruinessen, University of Utrecht

Martin van Bruinessen is Professor of the Comparative Study of Contemporary Muslim Societies. He was trained as a theoretical physicist but later switched to anthropology and conducted many years of field research in Kurdistan, Afghanistan and Indonesia. His published work is informed by a strong interest in history and politics. He carried out his first fieldwork among the Kurds of Iran, Iraq, Turkey and Syria in the mid-1970s and has frequently revisited that region. Between 1982 and 1994 he spent altogether nine years in Indonesia, in research and teaching. Returning to the Netherlands, he joined Utrecht University’s Faculty of Arts in 1994 as Assistant Professor of Turkish and Kurdish Studies, and became a full professor in 1998, with a shift of emphasis to Islamic Studies. He was involved in the establishment of the International Institute for the Study of Islam in the Modern World (ISIM) and occupied the ISIM chair at Utrecht University (1999-2008). He is a member of the scientific committees of the Zentrum Moderner Orient in Berlin and the Institut d’Études de l’Islam et des Sociétés du Monde Musulman (IISMM-EHESS, Paris).