(B.A., Johns Hopkins; M.A. & Ph.D., Princeton University), Professor of Islamic Studies and Director of the Drew University Center on Religion, Culture & Conflict (CRCC).  Professor Taylor has served on the Drew faculty since 1991. Previous to his appointment at Drew, Dr. Taylor served for one year as the Acting Executive Director of the Center for Arabic Study Abroad (CASA) at the American University in Cairo (AUC) and as the Dean of Calhoun College and Instructor of Near Eastern Studies at Yale University. Dr. Taylor’s research and scholarship deal with the social history of religion in the medieval Islamic world and the crisis of religious leadership in the contemporary Islamic world. He is the author of In the Vicinity of the Righteous: Ziyara and the Veneration of Muslim Saints in Late Medieval Egypt (Brill, 1999), and a number of articles on aspects of popular piety in Islam. He is currently working on a study about the social construction of moral imagination in the medieval Islamic world. Dr. Taylor has lived and traveled extensively in the Middle East and he has directed fifteen DIS (Drew International Seminars) in Egypt, Israel and Yemen. An avid scuba diver, Dr. Taylor is also a certified scuba instructor and frequently teaches scuba at Drew.