Graham, William A.

Dean, Harvard Divinity School, John Lord O’Brian Professor of Divinity, and Murray A. Albertson Professor of Middle Eastern Studies, Harvard University Professor Graham has been a member of the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences since 1973 and holds a joint appointment in Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations and the Study of Religion. Since 2000 he has been serving as Dean of Harvard Divinity School. He has served as director of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies, Master of Currier House, and chair of the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, the Committee on the Study of Religion, and the Core Curriculum Subcommittee on Foreign Cultures at Harvard. He is also former chair of the Council on Graduate Studies in Religion (United States and Canada). His scholarly specialization is in the early religious history of Islam, with special focus on the Qur’an and Hadith literatures. He is the author of Beyond the Written Word: Oral Aspects of Scripture in the History of Religion (1986), and Divine Word and Prophetic Word in Early Islam (1977), co-author of The Heritage of World Civilizations (now in its sixth edition, 2003) and of Three Faiths, One God (2002), co-editor of Islamfiche: Readings from Islamic Primary Sources, and the author of articles and reviews in both Islamic studies and the history of religion. He has taught reading courses in Classical Arabic, and seminars on religion and Islamic studies. Graham is a summa graduate of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and has M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from Harvard.