Elias Muhanna (editor/translator) is the Manning Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature at Brown University and the author of The World in a Book: Al-Nuwayri and the Islamic Encyclopedic Tradition. A scholar of classical Arabic literature and Islamic intellectual history, he has written for The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Nation, and Foreign Policy, and he runs the blog Qifa Nabki, about the contemporary Middle East. Born in Lebanon, he now lives in Providence, Rhode Island.