Ronald Lukens-Bull grew up internationally, living in five different countries before the age of 13. An abiding interest in the peoples and cultures of the world is a natural outgrowth of his early life. As an undergraduate, he first visited Southeast Asia and later became interested in Islamic education and leadership in Indonesia. He has been at the University of North Florida since 1999, where he currently serves as professor of anthropology and religious studies.
Prof. Lukens-Bull has written significant works on the anthropology of Islam. His 1999 theoretical article, Between Text and Practice: Considerations in the Anthropological Study of Islam, Marburg Journal of Religion, 4(2), 10-20, 1999, has been reprinted and widely cited. Prof. Lukens-Bull addressed methodological and ethical issues in his 2007 article Lost in a Sea of Subjectivity: The Subject Position of the Researcher in the Anthropology of Islam, Contemporary Islam: Dynamics of Muslim Life, 1(2), 173-192. His ethnographic research has focused on Islamic education in Indonesia starting with traditional Islamic education in A Peaceful Jihad: Negotiating Modernity and Identity in Muslim Java (Palgrave McMillan, 2005), which examines how this community is engaging globalization through curriculum revisions. His second book on this topic, funded largely by Fulbright grant, examines Indonesian Islamic higher education and the debates surrounding curriculum shift, which, in the current political climate, leads to accusations of apostasy and in extreme cases barely veiled death threats. Theoretically, this work is important in understanding counterradical discourses within the context of other Islamic discourse. This was published in 2013 as Islamic Higher xv Education in Indonesia: Continuity and Conflict (Palgrave McMillan, 2013).
Most recently, he received a Fulbright research grant in 2018-2019 to conduct research on GP Ansor, a youth movement with militia elements associated with Nahdlatul Ulama, the largest Islamic organization in Indonesia. The militia component, Banser, is compelling to study given that it is a Muslim militia committed to Indonesia as a plural democracy and the defense of religious minorities.
Since 2015, he has been the editor-in-chief of the Springer journal Contemporary Islam: Dynamics of Muslim Lives, one of the first journals focused on social scientific approaches to the study of Islam and Muslims
Mark Woodward is research professor at the Arizona State University Center for the Study of Religion and Conflict. He is a cultural anthropologist specializing in the study of Sufism, Salafism, and Islamic politics in Southeast Asia. He has conducted related research in India, Nigeria, and the United Kingdom
