Elias Muhanna

Elias Muhanna is a professor of Comparative Literature and History at Brown University. He is the author of The World in a Book: Al-Nuwayri and the Islamic Encyclopedic Tradition, and the translator, from the Arabic, of the fourteenth-century encyclopedia The Ultimate Ambition in the Arts of Erudition. He earned his doctorate in Near Eastern Languages & Civilizations from Harvard University and has held fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies and the Whiting Foundation. Muhanna’s essays and criticism have appeared in The New Yorker, The London Review of Books, The New York Times, The Nation, among others.