Asef Bayat is an Iranian-American Professor of Sociology. He currently holds the Catherine and Bruce Bastian Chair in Global and Transnational Studies in the Department of Sociology at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Prior to his tenure at Illinois, Bayat was a faculty member at the American University in Cairo and served as the Director of the International Institute for the Study of Islam in the Modern World (ISIM) at Leiden University, The Netherlands, where he also held the Chair of Society and Culture of the Modern Middle East. Additionally, he has held visiting positions at the University of California, Berkeley; Columbia University; the University of Oxford; and Brown University.

Personal Life

Asef Bayat was born in 1954 in a small village near Tehran where he attended a makeshift school in a warehouse with minimal instruction. After a gap in formal education, during which his father taught him, Bayat's family moved to Tehran, improving his educational opportunities. He is married to social anthropologist Linda Herrera and they have 2 daughters, Shiva and Tara.

Selected bibliography

Books

Articles