Robert Langer is an Islamic studies scholar and a cultural anthropologist specializing in the study of Islamicate cultures. He studied in Heidelberg, Damascus, Ankara, and Istanbul and received his PhD from the Faculty of Philosophy at Heidelberg University in 2004. From 2000 to 2002, he has accomplished his PhD project while he was a member of a junior research group at the Institute for Religious Studies at Heidelberg University, which was funded by the German Research Foundation’s Emmy Noether Programme. From 2006 to 2007, Robert Langer acted as a deputy assistant professor of Islamic studies (with a focus on social anthropology) at the Institute for Islamic Studies and Modern Oriental Philology at the University of Bern. Further positions as a deputy professor at several universities followed. After obtaining his postdoctoral qualification (Habilitation) at Heidelberg University in 2016, he was appointed Privatdozent (adjunct lecturer) with a venia legendi for Islamic studies. Until 2022, he worked as a senior research fellow for the history of religions at Orient-Institut Istanbul, which he joined in 2017. Prof. Langer conducted field research in Iran, Turkey, Armenia, and among different diaspora groups of Near and Middle Eastern origin in Europe.

Previous to his official appointment in September, Robert Langer had already taught as deputy professor for the Study of Religions with a focus on Islam at the University of the Bundeswehr Munich from 2020 on and was involved in the creation of the study program Cultural Studies at UniBw M. He is currently planning a German-African network for researchers on the topic of "Religion as a Resource in Africa" as well as research projects on Arab, Iranian, and Turkish interactions with Africa with a focus on religion as an element of soft power, on Sufi and Shiite religiosity in West Africa, and, in the field of digital humanities, a project to explore the religious use of geographic space through the analysis of social media.

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