Editors and Advisory Boards

Editor in Chief

John L. Esposito

Professor of Religion and International Affairs and Professor of Islamic Studies
Georgetown University
Founding Director of the Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding

John L. Esposito is a renowned scholar of Islam, political Islam from North Africa to Southeast Asia, and Religion and International Affairs. He is editor in chief of the four-volume Oxford Encyclopedia of the Modern Islamic World, The Oxford History of Islam, The Oxford Dictionary of Islam, and The Islamic World: Past and Present. His more than thirty books include Unholy War: Terror in the Name of Islam; The Islamic Threat: Myth or Reality?; Islam and Politics; Political Islam: Radicalism, Revolution or Reform?; and Islam and Democracy (with J. Voll). His writings have been translated into more than twenty-six languages, including Arabic, Turkish, Persian, Indonesian, Urdu, numerous European languages, Japanese, and Chinese.

A former president of the Middle East Studies Association and the American Council for the Study of Islamic Societies, Esposito is currently a member of the World Economic Forum's Council of 100 Leaders, the High-Level Group of the U.N. Alliance of Civilizations, and President of the Executive Scientific Committee for La Maison de la Mediterranee's 2005-2010 project, "The Mediterranean, Europe and Islam: Actors in Dialogue." Esposito is a recipient of the American Academy of Religion's 2005 Martin E. Marty Award for the Public Understanding of Religion and of Pakistan's Hilal-i Quaid-i-Azam Award for outstanding contributions in Islamic studies. He has served as a consultant to the U.S. Department of State, and to governments, corporations, universities, and the media. In 2003 he received the School of Foreign Service, Georgetown University Award for Outstanding Teaching.

Deputy Editor

Natana J. DeLong-Bas

Lecturer in Theology
Boston College

Natana J. DeLong-Bas is the author of Jihad for Islam: The Struggle for the Future of Saudi Arabia (Oxford, forthcoming, 2008); Notable Muslims: Muslim Builders of World Civilization and Culture; Wahhabi Islam: From Revival and Reform to Global Jihad; and Women in Muslim Family Law (with John L. Esposito). She has also written numerous book chapters and encyclopedia articles focusing on Saudi Arabia, Wahhabism, Islamic thought and history, Islam and politics, and contemporary jihadism, including al-Qa'ida. A consultant to several international corporations, governments, and the media, she is currently working with the King Abdul Aziz Foundation for Research and Archives in Saudi Arabia and IDC Publishers in the Netherlands to publish portions of the Foundation's historical manuscript holdings related to the history and development of Islam from the eighteenth century through the twentieth century.

Senior Editors

Shahrough Akhavi

Professor of Political Science
University of South Carolina

Shahrough Akhavi received his B.A. from Brown University, his M.A. from Harvard University, and his Ph.D. from Columbia University. Akhavi has conducted field research in Iran and Egypt in the sociology of Islam and social theory, with grants from the Ford Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Fulbright Senior Scholar Program, and the Social Science Research Council. He has served in the field of Iranian studies in various capacities, including as President of the Society for Iranian Studies from 2002 to 2003.

Akhavi is the author of Religion and Politics in Contemporary Iran and Middle Eastern Political Theories (forthcoming, 2009). He has also published approximately forty articles in diverse professional journals and books. He is editor of the Middle Eastern Series at the State University of New York Press and the Middle East Series in Politics, History and Law at Routledge Publishers. Akhavi served as section editor for the multi-volume Oxford Encyclopedia of the Modern Islamic World, senior consultant for The Oxford Dictionary of Islam, and senior editor of the multi-volume Oxford Encyclopedia of the Islamic World (forthcoming, 2008). He has presented papers, public lectures, and workshop presentations at leading universities throughout the world, including Harvard University, Yale University, McGill University, the University of Toronto, the University of Leiden, the Free University of Berlin, the American University in Cairo, and Tehran University. His current field of research is the dialectics of scripturalist and modernist discourses in contemporary Islamic thought.

Ibrahim Kalin

Assistant Professor, Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding
Georgetown University

Ibrahim Kalin is a faculty member at the Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding, Georgetown University. He received his B. A. from the University of Istanbul and Ph. D. from George Washington University.

Kalin has published widely on Islamic philosophy and the relations between Islam and the West. His book Knowledge in Later Islamic Philosophy: Mulla Sadra on Existence, Intellect and Intuition (Oxford, forthcoming, 2009) analyzes Mulla Sadra's attempt to recast knowledge in terms of existence and its modalities. His book Islam and the West was awarded the 2007 Writers Association of Turkey award for best book. He has contributed to several encyclopedias including MacMillan Encyclopedia of Philosophy 2nd Edition, Encyclopedia of Religion 2nd Edition, Biographical Encyclopedia of Islamic Philosophy and the Oxford Encyclopedia of the Islamic World.

Kalin has lectured on contemporary issues in various parts of the world and has traveled extensively in both Islamic and Western countries. Before joining Georgetown University, he was a faculty member at the Department of Religious Studies at the College of the Holy Cross. Kalin is also the founding director of the SETA Foundation for Political, Economic and Social Research based in Ankara, Turkey.

James Piscatori

Fellow of Wadham College and the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies
Member of the Faculties of Social Studies and Oriental Studies
University of Oxford

James Piscatori was formerly Professor in the Department of International Politics at the University of Wales, and Research Fellow at the Royal Institute of International Affairs, London. Piscatori is the author of Islam in a World of Nation-States and Muslim Politics (with Dale F. Eickelman). He is the editor of Islam in the Political Process and co-editor of Muslim Travellers: Pilgrimage, Migration, and the Religious Imagination. His article, "Islam, Islamists, and the Electoral Principle" appeared as the first in a series of papers for the International Institute for the Study of the Modern Muslim World (Leiden).

Piscatori serves on the editorial boards of various journals, including: The Journal of Islamic Studies; The Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs; and Islam and Christian-Muslim Relations. He is a member of the Academic Council of the Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding, Georgetown University. In November 2004 he delivered the Elie Kedourie Memorial Lecture of the British Academy, "Imagining Pan-Islam: Religious Activism and Political Utopias."

Tamara Sonn

William R. Kenan Distinguished Professor of Humanities in the Department of Religious Studies
College of William and Mary

Tamara Sonn specializes in Islamic intellectual history and Islam in the contemporary world. Her books include A Brief History of Islam; Interpreting Islam: Bandali Jawzi's Islamic Intellectual History; Islam and the Question of Minorities; Comparing Religions through Law: Judaism and Islam (with J. Neusner); and Judaism and Islam in Practice (with J. Neusner and J. Brockopp). She has contributed chapters and articles to numerous books and journals, as well as the Oxford Encyclopedia of the Modern Islamic World, the Encyclopedia of Women and Religion, and Colliers Encyclopedia. She was senior editor of the Oxford Dictionary of Islam and associate editor of The Islamic World Past and Present. She is also editor in chief of Religion Compass, Blackwell's online journal of religious studies, and a member of the editorial boards of the Muslim World, American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences, and Studies in Contemporary Islam.

John O. Voll

Professor of Islamic History
Associate Director of the Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding
Georgetown University

John O. Voll graduated from Dartmouth College and received his Ph.D. in History and Middle Eastern Studies from Harvard University. He taught at the University of New Hampshire for thirty years before joining Georgetown University in 1995. He is a past president of the Middle East Studies Association, and has served on the boards of a number of scholarly associations including the American Council of Learned Societies and the World History Association. He is the author of Islam: Continuity and Change in the Modern World; Islam and Democracy; and Makers of Contemporary Islam (co-author with John L. Esposito). He is author, editor, or co-editor of eight additional books and numerous articles and chapters on Islamic and world history.

The Library Advisory Board for Oxford Islamic Studies Online

Paul Auchterlonie is currently Librarian for Middle East Studies at the University of Exeter and Chair of the Middle East Libraries Committee (UK). Having graduated with a degree in Arabic from the University of Oxford in 1970, he studied Library Science at the University of London, and took up his first professional post in 1972 as Middle East Librarian at the University of Lancaster. In 1981, he moved to the University of Exeter, where he has been based ever since. He is a member of MELCOM (UK), of MELCOM International, and of the British Society for Middle East Studies and has served on numerous committees dealing with area studies librarianship. He is the author of several bibliographies, articles and book reviews in the field of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies.

Brenda Bickett is the Bibliographer at Georgetown University Library for the Arabic and Islamic Studies Department at the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies, the Center for Eurasian, Russian and East European Studies, the Division of Eastern Mediterranean Languages, the Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding, and the Slavic Languages Department.

Ali Houissa is the Middle East and Islamic Studies Bibliographer at Cornell University Library, Ithaca, New York since 1988. A graduate of the School of Library and Information Science, Indiana University, Bloomington in 1988; Fachhochschule för Bibilotheks-und Dokumentationswesen, Cologne, West Germany, 1986 Ph.D.-level [Thesis: Das öffentliche Bibliothekswesen in Tunesien]. Served as an elected member of the Executive Board of the Middle East Librarians' Association of North America (MELA). Elected Councilor-at-Large of the American Library Association (ALA), 2003-2006. Elected President of the MELA, 2005-2007.

William J. Kopycki has been the Middle East Bibliographer and head of Middle East Technical Services at University of Pennsylvania Libraries since 2003. William is responsible for the selection, acquisition and cataloging of library materials from and about the Middle East in support of Penn's relevant programs and research activities. He holds a Master's Degree in Arabic Literature from the American University in Cairo (1996) and a Master's Degree in Library and Information Science from University of Wisconsin--Milwaukee (2000). When not in the office he is usually traveling to the Middle East to acquire materials for the library and is involved in several international library projects in the region.

Mark Levine, manager of the History/Biography/Religion Division at the main branch of Brooklyn Public Library, graduated magna cum laude with a B.A in English from SUNY Albany, and received his MLS from the same institution. Previously he was the manager of two branches in the Brooklyn system. His main areas of interest and expertise are American history and comparative religion.

Kristina Ruelos received her BA and MA from New York University's Gallatin School of Individualized Study. She graduated with an MLIS from the University of Pittsburgh. She is currently the Senior Librarian of the Social Science, Philosophy and Religion Department of the Los Angeles Public Library.