Department of History

Faiz Ahmed is a historian of the Ottoman Empire and modern Middle East. Trained as a lawyer and social historian, Ahmed’s primary research interests are the late Ottoman Empire, Afghanistan, and greater Persianate world; legal and constitutional history; and diasporic communities tied to the amorphous region we today call the Middle East. From the Khyber Pass to the Turkish Straits, and the Suez Canal to New England, Ahmed’s core research engages questions of human mobility, travel, and migration; students, scholars, and networks of expertise; and the intersections of law, diplomacy, and humanitarianism.

Ahmed’s first book Afghanistan Rising: Islamic Law and Statecraft between the Ottoman and British Empires, a sociolegal history of how a diverse cast of Afghan, Ottoman, and Indian jurists contributed to winning Afghanistan’s independence from Britain and promulgated the country’s first constitution, was awarded the American Historical Association’s John F. Richards Prize in 2018. Pivoting to the western hemisphere, his 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. 

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 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. 

For a full academic profile and list of peer-reviewed publications, click here.

Note to students, colleagues, and organizations outside Brown University: By reason of prioritizing commitments to my current students and colleagues at Brown, I may not reply to all external queries in a prompt fashion. If you do not receive a response to your query within seven days, please assume I cannot accept your invitation or request at this time. Thank you for your interest and understanding. Sincerely, Prof. Faiz Ahmed