Ronald C. Kiener is Professor of Religion at Trinity College and Director of Trinity’s Jewish Studies Program, which came into existence in 1998. He was the founding Coordinator of Trinity's Major in Middle Eastern Studies, and continues to serve on its faculty.

Professor Kiener received his B.A. in Hebrew Literature from the University of Minnesota in 1976, and earned his Ph.D. in Religious Studies from the University of Pennsylvania in 1984. From 1981-83 he was a Visiting Instructor at Dartmouth College, and has taught at Trinity College since 1983. In 1989 he was a Visiting Lecturer at Smith College, Northampton, Mass. In 1998, he held a Lady Davis Visiting Professorship at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, and was a Visiting Professor at Tel Aviv University. He has been the recipient of a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship, as well as a Mellon Fellow­ship in Medieval Studies.

Professor Kiener is the co-author of The Early Kabbalah, which was published in 1986 as part of the Classics of Western Spirituality series.

Professor Kiener has also published articles in the field of medieval and modern Jewish and Islamic thought in a variety of scholarly journals. He is the author of several entries in the recently published HarperCollins Dictionary of Religion. Professor Kiener is currently working on a scientific edition of Saadia Gaon's Book of Beliefs and Opinions, to be published by the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities in Jerusalem, and will be publishing a book entitled Ecstatic Kabbalah: A Reader. He has also published a comparative study of Egyptian and Israeli fundamentalist thought.

Professor Kiener is a member of the Association for Jewish Studies, the World Union for Jewish Studies, the Middle Eastern Studies Association, and the American Academy of Religion. He has written extensively on Middle Eastern affairs for the Washington Post/L.A. Times wire service, via The Hartford Courant.