Scholar to Research Muslim Leadership Across U.S. and Danish Contexts

Hartford Seminary welcomes research scholar Niels Valdemar Vinding to campus this semester.

Dr. Vinding is from Denmark. He has a BA in Theology (University of Copenhagen, 2006), an MA in Islamic Studies (University of Copenhagen, 2009), and a Ph.D. in Islamic Studies (University of Copenhagen, 2013). Currently, he is working on a Post Doc at the Department on Cross-cultural and Regional Studies, University of Copenhagen. His general research is on Islam and Muslims in Denmark and Europe as part of a research team working on research about mosques in Denmark, funded by the Independent Research Fund Denmark.

Dr. Vinding will be exploring Muslim leadership and mosque research across Europe and the U.S. within the comparative context of Hartford Seminary and University of Copenhagen. His main purpose of joining Hartford Seminary is to compare Islamic chaplaincy, leadership training, and mosque research across European and American contexts. As follows from the Danish project on Danish Mosques – Significance, Use and Influence, he hopes to see how the training at Hartford empowers, enables, and authorizes a new generation of younger Muslim leadership in a highly contested and negotiated contemporary context, comparable to the Danish.

His recent publications include: Vinding, N.V., Racius, E., & Thielmann, J., (eds.), Exploring the Multitude of Muslims in Europe. Essays in Honour of Jørgen S. Nielsen, Muslim Minorities Series, Vol. 27, Leiden: Brill Publishers 2018; and Hashas, M., J. J. de Ruiter, and N. V. Vinding, (eds.) Imams in Western Europe, Developments, Transformations, and Institutional Challenges, University of Amsterdam Press, 2018.