| 1 | Name: | Professor Michael A. Cook | |
| Institution: | Princeton University | ||
| Year Elected: | 2001 | ||
| Class: | 4. Humanities | ||
| Subdivision: | 404b | ||
| Residency: | Resident | ||
| Living? : | Living | ||
| Birth Date: | 1940 | ||
Michael Cook is the Class of 1943 Professor of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University. He was educated at Cambridge, studying English and European History as well as learning Turkish and Persian. From Cambridge he went on to the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London, where his work focused on Ottoman population history in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. He taught Middle Eastern history at the School until 1986 when he left to join the faculty at Princeton. A prolific author, Professor Cook's publications include Early Muslim Dogma: A Source-Critical Study (1981), The Koran (2000), Commanding Right and Forbidding Wrong in Islamic Thought (2000), A Brief History of the Human Race (2003), and Ancient Religions, Modern Politics: The Islamic Case in Comparative Perspective (2014). His current areas of interest include the formation of Islamic civilization and the role played by religious values in that process. He has been the recipient of many awards and honors, including the Holberg Prize in 2014, the President's Award for Distinguished Teaching (awarded at Princeton's 2016 Commencement), the Balzan Prize for Islamic Studies in 2019, and the Middle East Medievalists Lifetime Achievement Award in 2020. In 2018 he was named Honorary Fellow at King's College London. Michael Cook was elected to membership in the American Philosophical Society in 2001. | |||