He received his PhD in religious studies from Boston University, where he specialized in pre-Modern Islamic history and thought. His publications include contributions to the Journal of Shi’a Islamic Studies, to The Princeton Encyclopedia of Islamic Political Thought (2012), and to an edited volume entitled Women, Leadership, and Mosques: Changes in Contemporary Islamic Authority (Brill, 2012). He is currently working on a book entitled Twelve Infallible Men: Imams and the Making of Shiʿism, which is slated for publication by Harvard University Press in 2015. This work analyzes early-classical Shiʿi biographical literature and its role in the development of Sunni and Shiʿi identities in the medieval period. Pierce has traveled widely in the Middle East and Central Asia and has spent time living in Egypt, Yemen, and Iran. Vimeo