Timothy Insoll is Al-Qasimi Professor of African and Islamic Archaeology in the Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies at the University of Exeter. Educated at the Universities of Sheffield and Cambridge, he was a Research Fellow at St John's College, Cambridge from 1995 until 1998, when he was appointed Lecturer at the University of Manchester. After becoming a Reader in 2004 and being awarded a personal chair in 2005 he moved to the University of Exeter in 2016. He is the author or editor of 16 books, three special journal issues, and numerous articles and reviews on a wide range of research topics across the discipline of archaeology, and has completed fieldwork in Mali, Ghana, western India, Bahrain, Eritrea, Ethiopia, and Uganda.