Dr Ali Riaz, Bangladeshi American political scientist and writer, has been elected as the president of the American Institute of Bangladesh Studies (AIBS).
AIBS is an association of institutions of higher learning in the United States aimed at promoting scholarly understanding between Bangladesh and the United States.
Currently, 25 universities are members of the AIBS, including the University of Chicago, Cornell University, University of Texas at Austin, Johns Hopkins University, Columbia University, and University of California-Berkeley. AIBS has also signed memorandums of understanding for cooperation with 24 Bangladeshi universities, including Dhaka University, Brac, IUB, Chittagong University, ULAB, and NSU.
Ali Riaz is a professor at the department of politics and government at Illinois State University (ISU), US, where he joined in 2002.
A lot of his work involves religion and politics, particularly South Asian politics and political Islam. He has written extensively on Bangladeshi politics and madrasas in South Asia.
He was the editor of Studies on Asia, a bi-annual journal of the Midwestern Conference on Asian Affairs, from 2010 to 2015.
He was also a public policy scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars at Washington DC during the Fall of 2013.
Dr Ali Riaz will serve a four-year term as president, starting on October 1, 2020.
