Patricia Crone, a visiting lecturer with the rank of professor in Near Eastern Studies and Mellon Professor of Islamic Studies, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, was elected a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy. Crone's research is focused on the Near East from late antiquity to the coming of the Mongols. She is interested in the delineation of the political, religious, and cultural environment in which Islam began and how it transformed, and was itself transformed by, the regions that the Arabs conquered. Originally a political, social, and military historian, she has been steadily moving into the history of ideas. She now works mainly on the Qur’an and the cultural and religious traditions of Iraq, Iran, and the formerly Iranian part of Central Asia. Crone is the second NES faculty member in recent years to become a Corresponding Fellow, joining Michael A. Cook, Class of 1943 University Professor of Near Eastern Studies, who was elected in 2011. The British Academy is an independent fellowship of leading academics that supports excellence in the humanities and social sciences. “Corresponding Fellows are scholars outside the UK who have 'attained high international standing in any of the branches of study which it is the object of the Academy to promote’.” Earlier this year, Crone was also was elected an Honorary Fellow of Caius College, Cambridge on May 17, 2013.