Ali Riaz (Bengali আলী রীয়াজ) is a Bangladeshi American political scientist and writer of Bangladeshi origins. He is a Professor of Illinois State University and was previously a Senior Broadcast journalist at BBC World Service. Most of his work deals with religion and politics, particularly on South Asian politics and political Islam. 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.