Joel S. Kahn

JOEL SIMMONS KAHN (BA Cornell University, MPhil, PhD, London School of Economics and Political Science, University of London) is currently Emeritus Professor in the Sociology & Anthropology Program at La Trobe University in Melbourne He has previously held Chairs in Anthropology at the University of Sussex in the UK, and at Monash University, and before that taught anthropology at University College London. He is a Fellow of Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia (elected, September, 1995).

His main work is in the broad area of social and cultural theory, with current interests particularly in phenomenology and the study of religious experience.

Over more than three decades he has carried out research on issues of development, globalization, race, culture, modernity, cosmopolitanism, identity formation, religious experience and secularization mainly in Southeast Asia. His current research project, funded by the Australian Research Council, is a comparative study of religion and transnationalism in Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Vietnam and the Philippines.

He is the author of 9 books, including: Minangkabau Social Formations: Indonesian Peasants and the World Economy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (1980); Fragmented Vision: Culture and Politics in Contemporary Malaysia (with Francis Loh K.W.) Sydney: Allen and Unwin and Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press (1992); Constituting the Minangkabau: Peasants, Culture and Modernity in Colonial Indonesia. Oxford and Providence: Berg (1993); Culture, Multiculture, Postculture, London: Sage (1995); Southeast Asian Identities: Culture and the Politics of Representation in Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia and Thailand. Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies (jointly published with Taurus, UK and St Martins Press, USA) (1998); Modernity and Exclusion. London: Sage (2001); Other Malays: Nationalism and Cosmopolitanism in the Modern Malay World. Asian Studies Association of Australia in association with Singapore University Press (Singapore) and NIAS Press (Copenhagen) (published in the United States by University of Hawaii Press) (2006) and some 50 articles and book chapters on related themes.