Giovanni Herran has a diverse background in the Humanities and Social Sciences.  He received his bachelors from City University of New York (Queens College) with a double major in Political Science and Hispanic Languages and Literatures.  He holds a Masters in History from City University of New York (Staten Island College).  His research in his Masters dissertation was on the intersection between Scientism, Empire, literary cultural production and Evolutionary theory, in 19^th century Western Europe.  He is currently a PhD Candidate at Temple University in the Religion Department.  His Area of concentration is Islamic intellectual history, primarily late Islamic philosophy and philosophical Sufism.  He is writing his dissertation on the comparative philosophical positions and ideas of the Andalusian scholar Ibn Arabi and his contemporary, the Zen Master, Dogen.  Highlighted in the dissertation is non-dualism (intellectual-intuition) as a mode of knowing that gives preference to being and praxis over theory and linguistic rumination.