Saxena Center for Contemporary South Asia

Faiz Ahmed (PhD, UC Berkeley, JD, UC Law San Francisco) is the Joukowsky Family Distinguished Associate Professor of Modern Middle Eastern History at Brown. Trained as a lawyer and social historian, Ahmed’s primary research interests are the late Ottoman Empire, Afghanistan, and the British Raj from the eighteenth to twentieth centuries; Islamic legal history; as well as diasporic communities tied to the regions we now call South Asia, Central Asia, and the Middle East. His first book, Afghanistan Rising: Islamic Law and Statecraft between the Ottoman and British Empires (Harvard University Press), was awarded the American Historical Association’s John F. Richards Prize for most distinguished work in South Asian History in 2018 and shortlisted for the British-Kuwait Friendship Society Book Prize in Middle East Studies. His peer-reviewed articles span multiple journals of law and history, as well as South Asia and Global South studies, including Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East; Global Jurist; International History Review; International Journal of Middle East Studies; Iranian Studies; Journal of Ottoman Studies; Journal of the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association; and Law and History Review. Dr. Ahmed is also co-organizer with colleagues Michael Vorenberg, Emily Owens, and Rebecca Nedostup of the Brown Legal History Workshop and Brown Legal Studies collaborative.