Ayaz Asadov is an Assistant Professor at the Alliance of Civilizations Institute. His research deals broadly with intellectual history and history of knowledge, historical and contemporary questions of epistemology, and theoretical interventions into contemporary issues through the conceptual reservoir of Islamic intellectual traditions. Trained across public policy, Islamic studies, and intellectual history at institutions in Germany, Qatar, and Türkiye, his scholarship moves between historical analysis and broader theoretical ambition.

His PhD thesis, supervised by Tahsin Görgün, examines the seventeenth and eighteenth century Ottoman notions of scholarly selfhood and introduces "malaka" as a fresh concept in virtue epistemology and the recent literature on epistemic virtues in early modern intellectual history. Reading the relevant educational materials, the thesis also argues for the presence of a pedagogical turn in Ottoman thought during the period in question.

He teaches graduate courses including a critical overview of academic approaches to the study of the contemporary Muslim world and its history (CIVS 577 Islam in Different Disciplines), a graduate-level introduction to philosophical anthropology (CIVS 536 Imagining the Human: Man, Monster, Machine), and a course on Ottoman intellectual history focusing on postclassical / early modern period, 1600–1800 (CIVS 531).

Selected Publications:

Asadov, Ayaz. 2026. “Filling the ‘Great Lacuna’? Recent Trends in the Eighteenth-Century Ottoman Intellectual History.” Global Intellectual History 11 (4): 482–500. doi:10.1080/23801883.2025.2478109.

Asadov, Ayaz. 2025. “The Epistemic Virtues of an Ottoman scholar: Discourses on being an ʿĀlim in the Later Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries.” History of Humanities. 10(2). University of Chicago Press. https://doi.org/10.1086/737036