Yusuf Casewit

Yousef Casewit is a former Humanities Research Fellow at New York University Abu Dhabi. He was also an Assistant Professor of Arabic Intellectual Heritage and Culture at the American University of Sharjah’s Department of Arabic and Translation Studies. He completed his M.A., M.Phil., and Ph.D. in Islamic Studies at Yale University’s Religious Studies Department in 2014. He holds a B.A. from The George Washington University with a focus on International Relations, Religion, and Middle Eastern Studies.

His research areas include Qur’anic Studies, medieval commentaries on the ninety-nine names of God, intellectual history of North Africa and al-Andalus, and Muslim perceptions of the Bible. He has several publications, the most recent is a study of the life and teachings of Ibn Barrajan (Cambridge University Press, March, 2016). He is currently working on a translation and critical edition of a commentary on the divine names by the Algerian scholar ʿAfif al-Din al-Tilimsani (d. 1291). Born in Egypt and raised in Morocco, he is fluent in Arabic, French and Spanish. Yousef has traveled throughout the Islamic world, and has studied with Muslim scholars in Morocco, Syria, and Mauritania.