Akeel Bilgrami received a BA in English literature from Elphinstone College, Bombay University, and went to Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar where he read philosophy, politics, and economics. He has a PhD in philosophy from the University of Chicago and is currently the Sidney Morgenbesser Professor of Philosophy at Columbia University, where he is also a professor on the committee on global thought.

He was the director of the Humanities Center at Columbia University for seven years and is now the director of its South Asian Institute. His publications include the books Belief and Meaning (1992), Self-Knowledge and Resentment (2006), and Secularism, Identity, and Enchantment (2014). He is due to publish two short books in the near future: What Is a Muslim? and Gandhi’s Integrity. His long-term work is on the relations between agency, value, and practical reason.