Ahmed Y. AlMaazmi
Assistant Professor of History
Affiliation: NYU Abu Dhabi
Education: PhD Princeton University
Research Areas: History of Science and Empire; Islamic Legal History; Environmental History; Slavery and Diaspora Studies; Indian Ocean World; Gulf and Arabian Peninsula
Ahmed Y. AlMaazmi is an assistant professor of history at New York University Abu Dhabi. His research examines the intersections of science, empire, law, and society across Arabia and the wider Indian Ocean world. His current book project, tentatively titled Enchanted Empire: Occult and Order in Early Modern Arabia, traces how occult-scientific knowledge was produced, mobilized, regulated, and contested in the Yaʿrubī Empire. The book situates Arabia within an interconnected Afro-Asian intellectual world and demonstrates how sciences such as astrology, lettrism, and alchemy shaped political authority, social relations, and legal order. The project develops from AlMaazmi’s dissertation, An Enchanted Sea: Occultism, Empire, and Society in the Western Indian Ocean, 1450–1750, which received the Gwenn Okruhlik Dissertation Award from the Association for Gulf and Arabian Peninsula Studies and an honorable mention from the World History Association. His peer-reviewed scholarship includes “Solomon’s Shadow,” published in Genealogical History in the Persianate World (2025), “I Authored This Book in the Absence of My Slave,” in Monsoon (2024), and “The Apocalyptic Hijab,” in Hawwa (2021).
Committed to public history, he has translated five academic books into Arabic, including Fahad Bishara’s A Sea of Debt (The Kalima Project, 2023) and Monsoon Voyagers (American University of Sharjah Press, forthcoming). He also founded and hosts the Indian Ocean World Podcast on the New Books Network, has delivered public lectures and led workshops across the UAE, and helped develop and curate a permanent exhibition on pearling and the incense trade that opened in 2026 at Qasr Al Watan, the Presidential Palace in Abu Dhabi.
Before joining NYU Abu Dhabi, AlMaazmi served as an assistant professor of history at United Arab Emirates University and worked in the heritage and tourism sectors in Sharjah and Abu Dhabi. He earned his PhD in Near Eastern Studies from Princeton University in 2025, after earning an MA in the same field there in 2021. Before attending Princeton, he pursued graduate study in cultural anthropology at Rutgers University as a Fulbright Fellow. He holds a BA with honors in International Studies from Zayed University and completed intensive language training at Leiden University, Paris-Sorbonne University Abu Dhabi, and the University of Dar es Salaam. His distinctions include Princeton’s Culture, Society, and Religion Graduate Research Fellowship and academic excellence awards presented by H.H. Sheikha Fatima bint Mubarak and H.H. Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum.
He welcomes students interested in the histories of Arabia and the Indian Ocean world, particularly those eager to explore questions of science, law, empire, and society across regions and disciplines.