Faiz Ahmed (PhD, History, UC Berkeley; JD, UC Law San Francisco) teaches in the Department of History at Brown University. Trained in law, social history, and the Arabic, Persian, and Turkish languages, Ahmed’s primary research specializations are the late Ottoman Empire; Afghanistan and greater Persianate world; and legal and constitutional history. From the Middle East and South Asia to the Americas, he has an abiding interest in the human interconnectivity often obscured by modern borders, regions, and area studies.
Ahmed’s first book Afghanistan Rising: Islamic Law and Statecraft between the Ottoman and British Empires is a sociolegal history of how a diverse cast of Afghan, Turkish, Arab, and Indian Muslim jurists contributed to winning Afghanistan’s independence from Britain and promulgated the country’s first constitution. Based on archival work in six countries, it was awarded the American Historical Association’s John F. Richards Prize and shortlisted for the British-Kuwait Friendship Society Book Prize in Middle East Studies in 2018.
Pivoting to the western hemisphere, Ahmed's current book project Ottoman Americana: The Late Ottoman Empire and the Early United States (under contract with Princeton University Press) explores the social, economic, and legal underpinnings of Ottoman-U.S. ties from the eighteenth to twentieth centuries, as seen from Ottoman sources and perspectives. Ahmed has also published multiple peer-reviewed articles in journals of law, history, 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 (Osmanlı Araştırmaları); Journal of the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association; Law and History Review; and Perspectives on History. Featured interviews include national radio to history channels and local news, such as Borderlines, Ottoman History Podcast, NPR’s Throughline, and the Boston Globe.
Professor Ahmed has held several external fellowships in support of his research in Ottoman and Islamic legal history, including as a Senior Fellow at Koç University of Istanbul; National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow at the American Research Institute in Turkey; Fulbright scholar in Cairo; and most recently, as a Visiting Fellow at Harvard Law School in 2023–24. He is also co-organizer with Brown University colleagues Michael Vorenberg, Rebecca Nedostup, and Emily Owens of the Brown Legal History Workshop and Brown Legal Studies collaborative.
Professor Ahmed is not accepting new PhD advisees at this time.
