Professor el-Sayed el-Aswad received his doctorate in anthropology from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He has taught at Wayne State University (USA), Tanta University (Egypt), Bahrain University and United Arab Emirates University (UAEU). He achieved the CHSS-UAEU Award for excellence in scientific research publication for the 2013-2014 academic year. He served as Chairperson of the Sociology Departments at both the UAEU and Tanta University as well as the Editor-in Chief of the Journal of Horizons in Humanities and Social Sciences: An International Refereed Journal (UAEU). He has published widely in both Arabic and English and is the author of Muslim Worldviews and Everyday Lives (AltaMira Press, 2012), Religion and Folk Cosmology: Scenarios of the Visible and Invisible in Rural Egypt  (Praeger Press, 2002; translated into Arabic in 2005) and The Folk House:  An Anthropological Study of Folk Architecture and Traditional Culture of the Emirates Society (al-Bait al-Sha‘bi) (UAE University Press, 1996).He has been awarded fellowships from various institutes including the Fulbright Program, the Ford Foundation, the Egyptian government, and the United Arab Emirates University.  He is a member of Editorial Advisory Boards of the Digest of Middle East Studies (DOMES), Muslims in Global Societies Series, Tabsir: Insight on Islam and the Middle East, and CyberOrient (Online Journal of the Middle). He is a member of the American Anthropological Association, the Middle Eastern Studies of North America, the American Academy of Religion, and the International Advisory Council of the World Congress for Middle Eastern Studies (WOCMES).  He has published eight books, over eighty papers in peer-reviewed and indexed journals, and over thirty book reviews.