Suzanne Conklin Akbari is Director of the Centre for Medieval Studies at the University of Toronto, and was educated at Johns Hopkins and Columbia. She has written books on optics and allegory (Seeing Through the Veil) and European views of Islam and the Orient (Idols in the East), and edited collections on travel literature (Marco Polo), Mediterranean Studies (A Sea of Languages), and somatic histories (The Ends of the Body).