Yasmin KOPPEN

Yasmin KOPPEN

Yasmin KOPPEN
Visiting Scholar (2025–2026)
Leipzig University

 

 

 

 

 

Yasmin Koppen is a postdoctoral researcher in the History of Religions at the Department of Religious Studies at Leipzig University. After completing her studies in Sinology and Religious Studies (B.A. 2010; M.A. 2012) at Ruhr-University Bochum, she worked at the LWL Museum of Archaeology and Culture in Herne until 2014 as a researcher for the exhibition "Treasures of Vietnamese Archaeology" and in museum education for "Uruk – 5000 Years of Megacity" and "AberGlauben [Superstition]." From 2014 to 2018, she was a research assistant at the Institute of Asian and Oriental Studies of Eberhard Karls University in Tübingen. While pursuing her doctorate as part of the AREA Ruhr graduate college (2017–2021) at Ruhr University Bochum (Ph.D. 2022), she explored how sacred landscapes in China and Vietnam function as places of political and religious authority. There, she developed the method of Experiential Architecture Analysis to link space, ideology and experience, which she published in East Asian Landscapes and Legitimation Localising Authority Through Sacred Sites in China and Vietnam (Frank & Timme). From 2019 to 2022, she was responsible for guided tours and workshops for all age groups in the museum education department of the Old Synagogue in Essen. She is a member of the German Association for Religious Studies (DVRW) and spokesperson for the working groups on the non-professorial teaching staff as well as on religion, collecting and exhibiting. Since 2022, she has been conducting research there with a focus on hydrolatry and the religionisation of indigenous environmental movements in Southeast Asia. Thematically, her research combines materiality, religious practice, identity negotiations and environmental policy with questions of de-/colonisation, legitimation and resistance. While at the Department of Religious Studies in the winter semester 2025/2026, she is teaching a course on "Illness, Healing, Medicine: Religion in Dealing with Epidemics."