Christopher Taylor

Educator/Teacher, Policy maker

Dr. Taylor has joined Habib University from Drew University in Madison, New Jersey, where he served on the faculty since 1991. He has also served as Professor of Islamic Studies and Chair of the Department of History at Drew University. Alongside his teaching responsibilities, Dr. Taylor has also served as the Dean of College of Liberal Arts at Drew between 2014 and 2017. He is also the Founding Director of the Drew University Center on Religion, Culture, and Conflict. Previous to his appointment at Drew, Dr. Taylor served for one year as the Acting Executive Director of the Center for Arabic Study Abroad (CASA) at the American University in Cairo (AUC) and as the Dean of Calhoun College and Instructor of Near Eastern Studies at Yale University.Dr. Taylor received his M.A. and Ph.D. from the Department of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University, and holds a B.A. from Johns Hopkins University.Dr. Taylor’s research and scholarship deal with the social history of religion in the medieval Islamic world and the crisis of religious leadership in the contemporary Islamic world. He is the author of In the Vicinity of the Righteous: Ziyara and the Veneration of Muslim Saints in Late Medieval Egypt (Brill, 1999), and a number of articles on aspects of popular piety in Islam. He is currently working on a study about the social construction of moral imagination in the medieval Islamic world. Dr. Taylor has lived and traveled extensively in the Middle East and he has directed 15 Drew International Seminars in Egypt, Israel, and Yemen. His extensive publication record is complemented by numerous academic honors and grants, as well as regular speaking engagements at educational, civic, and religious organizations and platforms.

I am passionate about education and learning, which is also my work because I believe that education has the greatest capacity to change the world for the better. Education empowers people to envision and then to make change possible. In particular, education prepares the next generation to improve the world they will soon inherit. A great education also creates critical habits of mind that nurture people’s curiosity and passion to learn for the rest of their lives, and this passion to keep learning over one’s lifetime is ultimately what makes life interesting – no matter how old you are. I also think that education is undergoing a massive global transformation at the moment, so this is an especially exciting time to be involved with education.

Academic Administration, Arabic Literature, Curriculum Development, Higher Education, Islamic History, Liberal Arts, Middle Eastern Studies, Scuba Diving, Strategic Leadership

I am the author of "In the Vicinity of the Righteous: Ziyara and the Veneration of Muslim Saints in Late Medieval Egypt (Brill, 1999)". I am a certified Scuba diver and teach Scuba diving during my free hours.