As Beyond Sharia team, we would like to congratulate Prof. dr. Asghar Seyed-Gohrab on his election to the board of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW). We are confident that he will dedicate himself with passion to advancing the humanities in the broadest sense.

Below you can read the announcement from the KNAW website:

Asghar Seyed-Gohrab, professor of Iranian and Persian Studies at Utrecht University, is to join the Board of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences and serve as chair of the Humanities Domain, one of the four domains into which Academy members are divided. He succeeds Martin van Hees, who will become Dean of the Tilburg School of Humanities and Digital Sciences effective 1 February 2026. Seyed-Gohrab will combine his executive work with his professorial duties for the next three years.

Seyed-Gohrab was appointed to his professorship at Utrecht University in 2020. Before then, he had been affiliated with Leiden University for nearly twenty-five years. Central to his research is the study of medieval Persian poetry and how it is deployed in modern Iranian politics, in popular culture, in visual representations and in social media. At the moment, he is the Principal Investigator of a major internal project examining critical, non-conformist movements in Islamic intellectual history – in an area ranging from the Balkans to Bengal – and how they shaped Islam.

Seyed-Gohrab is a former a member of the board of the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at Utrecht University and former chair of the Department of Middle Eastern Studies at Leiden University. At the Academy, he has served as vice-chair of The Young Academy, was a member of the Academy’s Council for Humanities, and sat on various juries for the Faces of Science project and the KNAW Education Prize.

Once he has been installed as a member of the Academy Board, Seyed-Gohrab will be keen to draw attention to the role of the humanities in society. ‘The humanities shape critical thinkers and therefore provide a yardstick for measuring the status of democracy in society,’ he says. ‘They not only help us understand one another better, but also create space for dissent. And that is precisely what is formative about a study programme in the humanities.’

Academy Board

The composition of the Academy Board is as follows:

Marileen Dogterom (president), Brenda Penninx (vice-president), Lodi Nauta (vice-president and general secretary), Martin van Hees (Board member and Humanities domain chairperson until 1 February 2026), Clara Mulder (Board member and Behavioural Sciences, Social Sciences and Law domain chairperson), Jacques Neefjes (Board member and Medical, Biomedical and Health Sciences domain chairperson) and Ton van der Steen (Board member and Natural Sciences and Technology domain chairperson)

For more information, see: https://www.knaw.nl/en/news/asghar-seyed-gohrab-joins-academy-board

Image: “Bowl with Repeating Persian Inscription Wishing for Good Fortune”, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Object Number: 2005.1