The historian and educator Avinoam Shalem is Riggio Professor for the Arts of Islam in the Department of Art History and Archaeology at Columbia University.

Shalem studied at the University of Tel Aviv and the University of Munich before earning a PhD from the University of Edinburgh in 1995. He specializes in the history of Islamic art, with a strong emphasis on Arab art in the Mediterranean Basin, the Near East, and the Levant, as well as in Spain, southern Italy, and Sicily. He also focuses on the art of the object, including secular and sacred aesthetics, as well as Jewish, Christian, and Islamic artistic interactions in the Mediterranean.