Dr. Asad Q. Ahmed is Associate Professor of Arabic and Islamic Studies in the Department of Near Eastern Studies, The University of California, Berkeley. Prior to holding this appointment, he was the Harper Schmidt Assistant Professor at the University of Chicago and a distinguished Mellon Foundation Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton. Dr. Ahmed received his BA with the highest honors from Yale University in 2000. His undergraduate work focused on western philosophy and literature, in which fields he received distinctions from the Department of Philosophy and the Department of Literature at Yale University.
He received his PhD with distinction from the Department of Near Eastern Studies, Princeton University, in 2007. Dr. Ahmed specializes in early Islamic social history and Islamic intellectual history, with a special focus on the rationalist sciences. He is the author of the following books: “The Religious Elite of the Early Islamic Hijaz” (Oxford, 2011), “Avicenna’s Deliverance: Logic” (Oxford, 2011), and “The Islamic Scholarly Tradition” (Brill, 2010).
He has also published numerous articles in the fields of Islamic rationalism, including philosophy, logic, and theology, in international journals and collected volumes. Dr. Ahmed currently chairs the Mellon Seminars called “Graeco-Arabic Rationalism in Islamic Transmitted Sciences: The Post-Classical Period” and is the editor-in-chief of the “Oxford Series in Post-Classical Islamic Intellectual History” (OUP). He is also co-editor of the prestigious international journal of Islamic Studies, called “Oriens,” and editor for the Qur’an and Early Islam sections of “The Marginalia Review.” He is the recipient of numerous distinguished fellowships and awards, such as the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Humanities Center, the Stanford Humanities Center, and the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies. He works with twelve research languages, including Arabic, Persian, Greek, Syriac, and Latin.
