Iqra Anugrah is a Trapezio MSCA Seal of Excellence Fellow at the Department of Foreign Languages, Literatures, and Modern Cultures at the University of Turin (UniTo) and a Research Fellow at the International Institute for Asian Studies (IIAS) at Leiden University.

Iqra also serves as a Research Associate at the Institute for Economic and Social Research, Education, and Information (LP3ES) in Jakarta, Indonesia. Previously he worked as a Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) Postdoctoral Fellow and then an Affiliated Researcher at Center for Southeast Asian Studies (CSEAS) at Kyoto University.

He has held research fellowships with the Transparency for Development (T4D) Project in Indonesia of Ash Center at Harvard Kennedy School and Results for Development Institute, University of Sydney’s Southeast Asia Centre, Asia Culture Center, Australian National University’s New Mandala, Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies (KITLV), Center of Muslim Politics and World Society at Indonesian International Islamic University, and Central European University Democracy Institute (CEU DI).

His first book project, tentatively titled “Farmers and Activists in Contemporary Indonesia: For and Against the Market” analyzes agrarian politics in contemporary Indonesia in the changing context of development and state-society relations.

He is currently embarking on a new project on the political theory of conservatism in modern Indonesia (1966-2019), looking at the strange parallels and curious divergences between Western and Indonesian conservatism and identifying the unifying logic of three competing conservative camps: anti-communist intellectuals, pro-market economists, and Islamist anti-feminist women writers.

His major research and teaching interests are democracy, statecraft, development, social movements, research methods, modern and contemporary political theory, and Southeast Asia. For a complete curriculum vitae please click over to his academia.edu page.

He obtained his PhD in Political Science and Southeast Asian Studies from Northern Illinois University. He also holds degrees from Ohio University and Ritsumeikan Asia Pacific University. For his research and professional pursuits, he has received funding from various institutions such as Japan’s Ministry of Education Scholarship, American-Indonesian Cultural and Educational Foundation (AICEF) Grant, Japan Foundation Asia Center Travel Grant, Chulalongkorn University’s ENITAS Scholarship, Southeast Asia Research Group (SEAREG) Travel Grant, and JSPS’s Grants-in-Aid for Scientific Research (Kakenhi), among others. More recently, he is appointed as a member of the scientific committee of ALTERSEA, a research group on social movements in Southeast Asia based at Centre Asie du Sud-Est.

Born and raised in the (then) populist South Jakarta, he spent his formative years in Southwestern Japan, American Midwest, and Rural Indonesia and at the School of Hard Knocks in financial and family responsibilities and street culture. He enjoys running, cooking, hiking, playing with random cats, and perfecting his coffee recipes. On some occasions, he will speak in Sundanese, his native childhood tongue, and curse in the hood language. In another universe, he is a no-nonsense professional raconteur and has been involved in several scholar-activist publication initiatives.

He makes regular, extended trips to Indonesia, divides his time between Turin and Amsterdam, and lives with his wife, a fellow scholar-activist, Rachma Lutfiny Putri.

All information listed on this profile are true and can be verified with various institutions that he is affiliated or working with.