NYU Abu Dhabi (NYUAD) Arts and Humanities Professor of Philosophy, Jonardon Ganeri has been awarded the Middle East Education Leadership Award for Best Professor in Philosophy. The award ceremony took place on October 12 in Dubai.

The Middle East Education Leadership Awards are presented by Asian Confederation of Businesses, with CMO Asia as its Strategic Partner, and Stars of the Industry Group as a research partner. The awards are presented to individuals and institutions that have exhibited the highest standards of excellence and set an exemplary precedent of field leadership, paving the way toward building future leaders through academic innovation.

“As a specialist in the philosophical literatures of South Asia, the significance of this award to me is that leadership in the Middle East higher education sector recognizes the indispensable intellectual context provided by the region’s proximity to South Asia, and the great cultural significance of its South Asian majority population," said Ganeri.

Ganeri’s research focuses on consciousness, the idea of philosophy as a practice as well as the history of ideas in early modern South Asia. He currently teaches courses in the philosophy of mind, the nature of subjectivity, Buddhist philosophy, and the history of Indian philosophical traditions. Ganeri’s published works include Attention, Not Self; Naturalism, Consciousness, and the First-Person Stance; and The Lost Age of Reason: Philosophy in Early Modern India 1450–1700.

Ganeri is an affiliated faculty member at the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World. He is a Fellow of the British Academy, and laureate of the Infosys Prize in the Humanities. He has also been named by Open Magazine one of India’s 50 Open Minds in 2016.