The 2014 Doctoral Completion Grant is awarded to Mr Aun Hassan Ali

Mr Aun Hassan Ali started his undergraduate Religious education at Rutgers University in New Jersey, where he studied Religion and Philosophy and graduated with highest honors in 2003. He later studied Arabic at the Yemen Language Center in Sanaa and, continued his quest for knowledge by achieving a Masters of Art degree with honors in 2007 at the McGill University’s Institute of Islamic Studies. After graduating, he worked as an Educational Program Director for Children of Abraham, an interfaith organization based in New York City and taught Islam and Arabic at Saint Francis College in Brooklyn, New York. A year later, he returned to the Institute to successfully complete his Doctorate. Aside from his education, he also received the State of Kuwait Graduate Prize in Islamic Studies in 2010 and, the Imam Ali Fellowship in Traditional Islamic Sciences by the Baitul Ilm Academy in Streamwood, Illinois in conjunction with Jami‘at al-Mustafa in Qom, Iran.

Mr Aun Hassan Ali’s thesis titled “The school of Hillah: a bibliographical study of Twelver Shi’i scholars in the late Abbasid and Ilkhanid periods” awarded him the 2014 Doctoral completion grant. An extract of the thesis reads, “My dissertation, titled “The school of Hillah: a biobibliographical study of Twelver Shi‘i scholars in the late Abbasid and Ilkhanid periods,” focuses on the remarkably understudied city of Hillah in southern Iraq between the twelfth and the thirteenth centuries. This was an extraordinary stage in the history of Shi‘ism, not least because it produced outstanding and seminal works in nearly every field of Islamic scholarship, and hosted several disparate intellectual trends in one city. Using state-of-the-art electronic databases with advanced Boolean search capabilities, I examine the lives and intellectual output of an unprecedented number of scholars–I cover more than 250 individuals–affiliated with Hillah in this period”.

The Doctoral Completion grant worth up to £2500 is an open competition inviting non-AMI doctoral students who are within one year of submission of their PhD dissertations. Any researchers who have the potential to impact mainstream academia and whose projects reflect and positively contribute to the research aims of the Institute will be considered for the support needed to assist in the completion of their projects.

The deadline for the applications for the next award is the 30th March 2015. For more information on how to apply for the Doctoral Completion Grant, click here.