Gregor Schoeler serves as chair of Islamic Studies at the University of Basel, Switzerland, and since 2000 has lectured at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes at the Sorbonne in Paris. He studied for his degree in Islamic Studies and Semitic Languages at the Universities of Marburg, Frankfurt, and Giessen, Germany. Schoeler has collaborated on both the Abu Nuwas project and the Cataloging of Oriental Manuscripts in Germany. His recent publications include The Oral and the Written in Early Islam (2006) and The Genesis of Literature in Islam: From the Aural to the Written (2009).