Rodrigo Adem (Ph.D., Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, The University of Chicago) is an historian of the premodern Middle East. As an intellectual historian, his research encompasses early Islamic thought in its diverse doctrinal manifestations and regional forms, and is dedicated to an intimate engagement with the textual sources of “classical Islam,” with an emphasis on epistemology, hermeneutics, historiography, and the construction of scholarly authority. His current book project, tentatively titled Necessary Proof, examines scholarly dissatisfaction with traditional authority as a religious sensibility unique to early Islamic thought, and explains the historical significance of the same in conversation with the history of philosophy, critical theory, and the sociology of knowledge. As a social historian, he is interested in the urban development of medieval Syria (and Damascus in particular) as entry point for the distinctive features of the medieval Middle Eastern city as archive of literary and material culture, site for the formation of regional, ethnic, and religious identities, and center for standardization of knowledge production and dissemination of norms and tastes. His courses include: Introduction to Islamic Civilization; Knowledge, Desire, and Power in Classical Islamic Thought; Advanced Readings in Classical Arabic & Islamic Thought; and Readings in Arabo-Islamic Historiography.