Until her retirement in 2009, Wadad Kadi was the Avalon Foundation Distinguished Service Professor and Professor of Islamic Thought at the University of Chicago. She received her BA and MA degrees in Arabic Literature at the American University of Beirut, pursued doctoral studies at the University of Tübingen, Germany, and then completed her Ph.D. at AUB. She has published critical editions of several of Abu Hayyan al-Tawhidi’s most important works, as well as works by al-Qadi al-Nu’man and collections of the earliest extant administrative Arabic prose. She is the author of a large number of articles ranging in scope from early Islamic culture to modern Arabic literature, has taught at Yale, AUB, and the University of Chicago, and been a visiting professor at Harvard, Columbia, the University of Stockholm, and Oxford.