Ahmed El Shamsy is an associate professor of Islamic thought at the University of Chicago. He studies the intellectual history of Islam, focusing on the evolution of the classical Islamic disciplines and scholarly culture. His research addresses themes such as orality and literacy, the history of the book, and the theory and practice of Islamic law. His latest book, Rediscovering the Islamic Classics: How Editors and Print Culture Transformed an Intellectual Tradition, shows how Arab editors and intellectuals in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries used the newly adopted medium of printing to rescue classical Arabic texts from oblivion and to popularize them as the classics of Islamic thought. El Shamsy is a native of Germany and studied in the United Kingdom, Egypt, and the United States.