Ivan Kalmar is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Toronto. His current research focuses on illiberalism in Europe, with a focus on relations between the post-communist members of the European Union and the rest. Among other things, he relates racism by and racism against “Eastern Europeans.” Kalmar’s books include Orientalism and the Jews (University Press of New England, 2005), Early Orientalism: Imagined Islam and the Notion of Sublime Power (Routledge, 2012),  Racism in Germany: Islamophobia East and West (Routledge, 2022) with Nitzan Shoshan, and White But Not Quite: Central Europe’s Populist Revolt (University of Bristol Press, 2022). Special issued edited or co-edited by Kalmar include “Islamophobia in the East of the European Union” (Patterns of Prejudice, 2018) and “Race and “Racialization in the East of the European Union” (Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 2023).  Kalmar’s work appears as book chapters and journal articles in publications dealing with the topics of race and religion, Jews and Muslims, language and nationalism, and others.

Currently Kalmar is decentering his work on Central Europe to uncover connections with the rest of what he calls “the white periphery:” people with partial white privilege occupying a semi-peripheral position in the global system of racial capitalism. Within this context, he aims to relate Central/Eastern and Southern Europe, in a five-year project supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.