Ali Riaz (Bengali: আলী রীয়াজ) is a Bangladeshi American political scientist and writer. He is a Distinguished Professor at Illinois State University[1] where he joined in 2002. Most of his work deals with religion and politics, particularly on South Asian politics and political Islam.[2] He has written extensively on Bangladeshi politics and madrasas in South Asia. He was the editor of Studies on Asia, a bi-annual journal of the Midwestern Conference on Asian Affairs (2010–2015). He was also a public policy scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars at Washington DC during the Fall of 2013