Dr. Timothy Garrett is Program Coordinator for Islamic Studies at UCLA, where he administers the CIW lecture series and leads the initiative’s summer fellowship series, working closely with teacher fellows to develop classroom lessons throught he use of primary and secondary sources, museum and exhibition resources, and historically grounded approaches to the medieval Islamic world.

A proud alumnus of UCLA’s PhD program in Islamic Studies, Dr. Garrett studies the medieval Islamic world, with particular interests in interreligious exchange, sectarianism, and competing visions of the caliphate. He focuses especially on the political history of the Fatimid period. He is the author of several academic articles and of The Best of the Companions: An Islamic Treatise on the Succession of the Prophet (Institute of Ismaili Studies, forthcoming 2027), a critical edition and English translation of a work by the Fatimid-era scholar Ḥamīd al-Dīn al-Kirmānī. Beyond UCLA, he serves as Secretary-Treasurer of the American Society for Premodern Asia (formerly the American Oriental Society), where he helps organize the society’s annual meeting and oversees its membership and communications.

Prof. Asma Sayeed is Professor and Director of UCLA's Islamic Studies Program. Her primary research interests are in early and classical Muslim social history, the history of Muslim education, the intersections of law and social history, and women and gender studies.  Her book, Women and the Transmission of Religious Knowledge in Islam (Cambridge University Press, 2013) analyzes  Muslim women’s religious education, specifically their transmission of hadith from the rise of Islam to the early Ottoman period.  She teaches “Introduction to Islam” and courses on the Qur’an and Islam in the West as well as graduate seminars on research methodologies in Islamic studies and Muslim social and intellectual history.

She received her PhD from the Department of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University. She was previously Assistant Professor in the Department of Religious Studies at Lafayette College (Easton, PA), where she taught courses in Islam and World Religions.  She has published on topics related to Muslim women and their religious participation in journals such as Studia Islamica and Islamic Law and Society and has contributed a number of encyclopedia articles on women’s history in early and classical Islam.  In 2010, she undertook archival research in Syria on Muslim women’s education in the Ayyubid and Mamluk periods under the auspices of a Fulbright fellowship. Her current project relates to Muslim education and in particular to an examination of texts and textual practices in diverse regional and historical contexts.