Dr Laurens de Rooij gained his doctorate at Durham University in England. His research examines how non-Muslim people (mainly in Europe) interact with Islam and Muslims and how that affects their interpretation and conceptualization of Islam and Muslims, as well as any subsequent interactions. This is approached from an interdisciplinary perspective that discusses the issue of media reports about Muslims and Islam whilst drawing upon areas such as hermeneutics, media studies, philosophy of identity, post-colonial theory, sociology, and religious studies. His research hopes to garner a greater understanding into the way that non-Muslim individuals understand and interpret Islam, as well as the effect say a media report can have on that understanding, and the way people interact with Muslims on a daily basis.

Laurens has spent time at a number of institutions across the globe, these include: The Graduate School of the Syarif Hidayatullah State Islamic University in Jakarta, Indonesia (spring 2013), the Religion Department at Duke University in Durham North Carolina, USA (Autumn 2013), The Centre for Religion, Media and Culture in the Journalism & Mass Communication Department at the University of Colorado in Boulder, Colorado, USA (spring 2014), and at Brazil’s Fundação Joaquim Nabuco (summer 2016). In 2017, he was a post-doctoral research fellow at the University of Cape Town for a year, where his research analyses how the media discourse on minorities (particularly Muslims and Islam) affects how they are conceptualized, understood, and treated in South Africa. This work was supported in part by the National Research Foundation of South Africa. He was also a lecturer at the University of Chester (2018), and a researcher at London Metropolitan University (2018-2020), Toulouse School of Management (2021-2022) in France, and Mahidol University in Bangkok, Thailand (2022-2023).

He is also committed to the excellence in teaching and enjoys working with students at all levels of study and sharing in their interests. This work has been supported by completing Durham’s Learning and Teaching Award (DULTA) in 2014, and recognised by becoming a Fellow of the UK’s Higher Education Academy in 2016.