Asad Q. Ahmed is professor of Arabic and Islamic Studies, University of California, Berkeley, USA and Leverhulme professor at the University of Cambridge, UK.  He received his BA from Yale University in 2000 and his Ph.D. from Princeton University in 2006 from the Department of Near Eastern Studies.  He specializes in early Islamic social history and Islamic intellectual history, with a focus on the history of philosophy, science, and legal theories.  He is the author of several books and articles, including The Religious Elite (2011), Avicenna's Deliverance (2011), and The Hashiya and Islamic Intellectual History (ed. 2013).  He is also the co-editor of the journals Oriens (Brill), South Asian Intellectual History (Brill), and the book series Berkeley Series in Post-Classical Islamic Intellectual History (UC Press).  His awards include the Term Chair at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes, Paris, Fulbright IIE and Hays, and the National Endowment for the Humanities and appointments at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton and the Stanford Humanities Center.