Leif Stenberg

Leif Stenberg (Ph.D) is the Dean of the Institute for the Study of Muslim Civilisations[1] at the Aga Khan University (International) in London since April 2017. Earlier he was the founding director of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at Lund University, Sweden, between 2007 and 2017.

Leif Stenberg received his B.A. degree from Lund University in 1987. His award-winning doctoral thesis entitled The Islamization of Science. Four Muslim Positions Developing an Islamic Modernity was defended in 1996. The thesis was supervised by Jan Hjärpe, and Stenberg's work has been influenced by both scholars such as Jan Hjärpe and Michel Foucault, which is apparent in his doctoral thesis, where Foucauldian concepts and definitions are engrained in the text. After finishing the thesis he was an Assistant Professor in History of Religions at Uppsala University for a year. In 1997 he received a grant from the Swedish Foundation for International Cooperation in Research and Higher Education (STINT) that took him to the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard university from 1997 to 1999. After Harvard, Stenberg received a grant from the Swedish Research Council and carried out fieldwork in Damascus, Syria, in 1999 and 2000. While in Damascus Stenberg was a visiting scholar at Institut Français d’Études Arabes de Damas (IFEAD). The project in Syria concerned contemporary Sufism, which he has been actively researching and publishing about since the mid-1990s.

Stenberg also worked at Växjö University (today Linné University), but since 2001 he held a position at Lund University in Islamology and he became an Associate Professor in 2003. In 2011 Stenberg was appointed full professor at Lund University. In his capacity as the founding Director of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies (CMES) he was assigned by Lund University to be the lead writer in 2008/2009 of an application entitled “The Middle East in the Contemporary World (MECW)”. This was a so-called Strategic Research Area and it generated a grant of about 70 million SEK to Lund University by the Ministry of Higher Education in 2009. This funding was instrumental in expanding the CMES at Lund University from a few scholars to about 25 scholars at the time when Stenberg stepped down as a director in 2017. In 2015, an international committee evaluated the first five years of MECW very positively and funding was renewed. In sum, in the ten years as director he managed to build and expand the CMES dramatically in regard to the increase of employees, external funding and annual turnover.

In his capacity as the Dean of the Aga Khan University Institute for the Study of Muslim Civilisations (AKU-ISMC) in London, Stenberg has led the AKU-ISMC during the move from earlier location to the award winning Aga Khan Centre at King’s Cross. In addition, he has been leading the work to restructure the Institute, expanding its research outcome, develop a new MA-programme, including a collaborative dual degree programme with Columbia University, and increase the publication and outreach programmes.

His research on Sufism in Syria has resulted in many publications. One of the most recent is a volume edited by Stenberg and Professor Christa Salamandra entitled Syria From Reform to Revolt: Volume 2: Culture, Society and Religion (2015). Currently Stenberg is working on two book projects, one on the contemporary status of Islamic Studies and the other on the modern history history of Kuwait.

Stenberg was the president of the Nordic Society of Middle Eastern Studies between 2010 and 2019. He is also a member of the World Congress of Middle Eastern Studies (WOCMES) Council since 2014, and vice-president of the European Association for Middle Eastern Studies (EURAMES) since 2013. In addition, between 2013 and 2018 he served at the Expert committee of Humanities and Social Sciences, Research Council of Norway. During the years 2017 and 2018, Sweden was an elected member of the United Nations Security Council (UNSC). Within this period, Stenberg was appointed member of a council of experts advising the Swedish Foreign Ministry.