Faiz Ahmed

Faiz Ahmed is the Joukowsky Family Distinguished Associate Professor of Modern Middle Eastern History in Brown University’s Department of History. He received his PhD in History from the University of California, Berkeley in 2013, MA in Anthropology from Berkeley in 2007, JD with a concentration in International Law from University of California College of the Law, San Francisco in 2006, and BA in History and Near Eastern Studies with Distinction in Scholarship from Berkeley in 2002. Ahmed joined Brown University as Assistant Professor of History in 2013, was promoted to Associate Professor in 2018, and assumed his current distinguished position in 2020. Trained in law, social history, and the Arabic, Persian, and Turkish languages, he specializes in legal and constitutional history across the Ottoman lands, Afghanistan, and the greater Persianate world. His scholarship explores how scholars, lawyers, and everyday people debated, fought over, and negotiated ideals of justice, dignity, and equality within their historical and sociocultural contexts. From the Khyber Pass to the Americas, Ahmed’s work highlights human interconnectivity often obscured by modern borders, regions, and area studies paradigms. He co-organizes the Brown Legal History Workshop and Brown Legal Studies collaborative with colleagues Michael Vorenberg, Rebecca Nedostup, Emily Owens, and Tiraana Bains.

Ahmed’s first monograph, Afghanistan Rising: Islamic Law and Statecraft between the Ottoman and British Empires (Harvard University Press, 2017), won the American Historical Association’s John F. Richards Book Prize in South Asian History in 2018 and was shortlisted for the British-Kuwait Friendship Society Book Prize in Middle East Studies. His second book, Ottoman Americana: The Late Ottoman Empire and the Early United States, is under contract with Princeton University Press. Select peer-reviewed publications include “Courts and Constitutions in South Asia and the Global South: A View from the Middle East” in Law and History Review (2023), “Meddling with Medals, Defending the Dead: Late Ottoman Soft Power from South Asia to North America” in International History Review (2021), “Success, Failure, and Other Historical Crafts” in Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East (2021), and “In the Name of a Law: Islamic Legal Modernism and the Making of Afghanistan’s 1923 Constitution” in International Journal of Middle East Studies (2016). Ahmed has held major fellowships as Visiting Fellow at Harvard Law School’s Program on Law and Society in the Muslim World (2023–2024), Senior Fellow at Koç University’s Research Center for Anatolian Civilizations (2019–2020), National Endowment for the Humanities Advanced Fellow via the American Research Institute in Turkey (2016–2017), Fulbright Scholar in Cairo (2003), and others from the Social Science Research Council and Council of American Overseas Research Centers.

Professional Email: faiz_ahmed@brown.edu