Zachary Wright received his PhD (history) from Northwestern University, his MA in Arabic studies/Middle East history from the American University in Cairo, and his BA in history from Stanford University. He teaches classes on Islam in Africa, Islamic Intellectual History, African history, and Middle East history. His research focuses on Islamic intellectual history in West and North Africa, from the 15th century to the present. Most of Wright’s field research has been conducted in Senegal, Morocco, and Mauritania, with Arabic, French, and Wolof language sources. He serves as a faculty affiliate of Northwestern’s Program of African Studies (PAS), Institute for the Study of Islamic Thought in Africa (ISITA), and the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) program. Wright became Muslim in 1997 in Medina-Baye, Senegal, and spent many years studying the traditional Islamic sciences with Shaykh Hasan Cisse and Shaykh Tijani Cisse along his academic research.