Nadia El Cheikh is a scholar of the Abbasid Caliphate and Byzantium. She earned her BA in History and Archaeology with distinction from the American University of Beirut in 1985 and her PhD from Harvard University in 1992. Her publications include Byzantium Viewed by the Arabs (2004), Crisis and Continuity at the Abbasid Court (2013), Formal and Informal Politics in the Caliphate of al-Muqtadir (2013), and Women, Islam, and Abbasid Identity (2015), published by Harvard University Press and recently translated into Arabic, among other studies. At the American University of Beirut, El Cheikh served as Director of the Centre for Arab and Middle Eastern Studies, as well as Chair of the Department of History and Archaeology, before being appointed Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at AUB, becoming the first woman to assume the post in the faculty’s history. In 2022, she was appointed Vice Provost for Cultural and Research Engagement at NYU Abu Dhabi.