Home

Willem de Koster (Delft, 1984) is a cultural sociologist at Erasmus University Rotterdam and a member of the Centre for Rotterdam Cultural Sociology (CROCUS). He obtained his PhD from this university in 2010, with a thesis entitled ‘Nowhere I Could Talk Like That’: Togetherness and Identity on Online Forums. This book addresses the virtual community debate in Internet studies and focuses on the question of how different types of virtual togetherness on online forums can be understood in relation to offline social life.

In addition to his Internet research, results of which have been published in Information, Communication & Society, Sociologie, and Symbolic Interaction, Willem studies the genesis and manifestations of contemporary cultural conflict in Western countries. In collaboration with various colleagues, he has written on different forms of tolerance and their political implications, controversial cartoons, agony of choice, the rise of the penal state, the public role of religion, welfare chauvinism, and anti-immigrant voting. His publications on these matters appear in Annual Review of the Sociology of Religion, British Journal of Criminology, European Journal of Cultural Studies, International Political Science Review, Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, Journal of European Social Policy, Mens en Maatschappij, Res Publica, and Sociologie.

Willem's book Paradoxes of Individualization (with Houtman and Aupers) has been published with Ashgate, UK, and he is working on The Logic of Ideology (with Achterberg, Houtman and Van der Waal). Meanwhile, he continues his research in political sociology in the project The Dutch Paradox of Tolerance: Post-Christian Cultural Polarization and PVV-Voting, which has been funded by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO).

In addition to his research activities, Willem teaches various courses in sociology and serves on the editorial board of the Dutch peer-reviewed journal Sociologie.

Contact

Dr. Willem de Koster

Department of Sociology
Faculty of Social Sciences
Erasmus University Rotterdam
P.O. Box 1738
3000 DR Rotterdam
The Netherlands

tel: +31 10 408 2390
fax: +31 10 408 9098
e-mail: dekoster@remove-this.fsw.eur.nl