Dr Lin is an Assistant Professor with the NUS Department of Southeast Asian Studies. His research interests lie in the intersection between Islam and Marxism in Indonesia. More broadly, he is also interested in the articulation of progressive Islamic ideas across the Muslim world. His first monograph, Ummah Yet Proletariat: Islam, Marxism and the Making of the Indonesian Republic was published by Oxford University Press in 2023.

His second book project is tentatively titled “Progressive Islamic Discourses Circulating Across a Maritime Muslim World.” This project will trace the circulation of progressive Islamic discourses across the Indian Ocean, which can be conceived of as connective tissue linking the components of what might be called the Islamic maritime world. These are regions in which Islam has played an important role in shaping societies, regions that are linked to each other by longstanding networks of trade, pilgrimage, and intellectual contacts. Geographically, this project is sited in those parts of the ummah connected by the Indian Ocean: Egypt, Arabia, Iran, South Asia, and the Malay Archipelago. Temporally, it is concerned with the late nineteenth century and most of the twentieth century, an era in which self-consciously progressive discourses were articulated by Muslim intellectuals. Thematically, it focuses on identifiably progressive ideas such as remedying socio-economic inequity, promoting women’s rights, defending intercommunal tolerance, normalizing the separation of religion from government, and perhaps most important of all, developing novel approaches to the science of Islamic jurisprudence (fiqh).