Anna Ayşe Akasoy is Professor of Islamic intellectual history at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. She teaches classes on a range of subjects such as tolerance, the pursuit of happiness, cultural encounters, and travel literature, and is currently writing a cultural history of falconry in the Middle East until the Ottoman period. Professor Akasoy’s research combines Arabic falconry manuals, veterinary medicine, social and political history, Islamic law and ethics, Arabic poetry, and art history and archaeology. Her second research field is concerned with Muslim-Buddhist contacts. In addition to authoring a short book on Rashīd al-Dīn, a patron and scholar of the Mongol period, she considers the significance of idols and idolatry in Muslim representations of Buddhism and Indian religions. Professor Akasoy’s third area of research combines philosophy and literature, focusing on theories and narratives of decision-making in the Islamic world and exploring intersections between epistemology, interpersonal and societal ethics, political philosophy, psychology, and narrative expression. One of the ambitions of this project is to explore news ways in which Islamic traditions can contribute to discussions about present-day concerns.
