Michael Cook is the Class of 1943 University Professor of Near Eastern Studies. Before joining the Near Eastern Studies Department at Princeton in 1986, he taught for twenty years in the History Department of the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London.
He was a Guggenheim Fellow in 1990 and received a Mellon Distinguished Achievement Award in 2002. His field is the history of the Islamic world. His books include The Koran: a very short introduction (2000); Commanding right and forbidding wrong in Islamic thought (2000); A brief history of the human race (2003); and Studies in the origins of early Islamic culture and tradition (2004). He is the general editor of The New Cambridge History of Islam (2010).
