Christoph Marcinkowski: Encyclopedia II - Christoph Marcinkowski - Academic Positions and Work Experience

Christoph Marcinkowski - Academic Positions and Work Experience

In January 1999, Professor Al-Attas appointed him Senior Research Fellow at ISTAC, and already in January 2002 Marcinkowski became Associate Professor of History. Marcinkowski´s teaching activities at ISTAC involved courses on Islamic history and historiography, as well as history of Western civilization. In addition to this, he supervised several master's theses and doctoral dissertations. Moreover, from 1999 to 2003, he functioned also as the Head of the ISTAC Doctoral Dissertations and Masters Theses Format-Committee.

However, Dr. Marcinkowski´s personal focus at ISTAC was on research: Since 2000, he has participated at more than 25 international conferences, seminars, and public lectures on invitation in Europe, the United States, Australia, and Southeast Asia, which led him to extended travels and resulted in more than 50 published articles in distinguished academic journals. During his tenure at ISTAC, Marcinkowski had also been Visiting Professor and Advisor at the Islamic Arts Museum Malaysia (IAMM) at Kuala Lumpur, and since November 2003 he is also Academic Editor of the "Contemporary Islamic Scholars Series" for the publishing house Pustaka Nasional, Singapore.

In July 2004, Dr. Marcinkowski resigned from his position at ISTAC, in solidarity with Professor Al-Attas, who had been forced out of office when ISTAC´s autonomy was revoked unlawfully. In the same month, Marcinkowski accepted a position as Associate Research Scholar and member of the editorial team offered to him by Professor Ehsan Yarshater, one of the world's leading scholars of Iranian Studies as well as Director of the Center for Iranian Studies and Editor of the Encyclopedia Iranica at Columbia University.

In June 2005, Dr. Marcinkowski returned to his native Berlin, where he worked as an independent scholar and writer. In December 2005 he emigrated to Singapore where he presently lives and works as an academic editor for several distinguished publishing houses, as well as a contributor to a number of English-language newspapers in Southeast Asia. Currently, Dr. Marcinkowski is working on his two latest books, one of them entitled The Gate of Knowledge. My Years with the International Institute of Islamic Thought and Civilization (ISTAC), Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, and the other one dealing with the history of the Arab Hadhrami sayyids of Singapore (see also Hadhramaut and Yemen).

In his recent writings, he addressed also several issues of contemporary politics, such as that of Muslim unrest in Southern Thailand (see also Pattani separatism and South Thailand insurgency), in a paper entitled “'Kidnapping' Islam? Some Reflections on Southern Thailand's Muslim Community Between Ethnocentrism and Constructive Conflict-Solution” [9]. The paper was submitted to the 1st Inter-Dialogue Conference on Southern Thailand (FIDCOST), Pattani, Thailand (June 13-15, 2002), which was organized by Prince of Songkla University, Pattani, Thailand, and Harvard University’s Department of Anthropology, and sponsored by the Rockefeller Foundation and Toyota Foundation (also forthcoming in print).

Besides his native German, Marcinkowski is fluent in English, French, Italian, Spanish, and Persian (farsi), has a thorough knowledge of Classical Arabic, Modern and Ottoman Turkish, Latin, and Classical Greek, and access to Polish, Malay/Indonesian and Thai.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Academic Positions and Work Experience", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki