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About Ahmed Almaazmi
Ahmed Yaqoub AlMaazmi أحمد يعقوب المازمي (PhD Princeton) is Assistant Professor of History at New York University Abu Dhabi, with interests in the intersections of empire, science, slavery, law, environmental infrastructures, and material culture in the Arabian Peninsula and the wider Indian Ocean world.
Dr. AlMaazmi received his PhD in Near Eastern Studies from Princeton University in 2025, where his dissertation “An Enchanted Sea: Occultism, Empire, and Society in the Western Indian Ocean, 1450-1750,” examined themes such as the rise and roles of astronomy/astrology, alchemy, and lettrism in Southeastern Arabia, oceanic imperial power, encyclopedic scholarship, material culture, Islamic law, gendered practices, slavery, and mass persecutions. He previously studied cultural anthropology at Rutgers University as a Fulbright Fellow in 2016 and received a B.A. (Hons.) in International Studies from Zayed University in 2015.
Dr. AlMaazmi promotes public history through projects that connect scholarship with wider communities. He founded and hosts the Indian Ocean World Podcast on the New Books Network, translated five monographs into Arabic, delivered numerous public talks in the UAE and abroad, and engages with material culture in his works. His recent works include the article, “I Authored This Book in the Absence of My Slave: Enslaved East Africans and the Production of Occult Knowledge across the Omani Empire.” Monsoon: Journal of the Indian Ocean Rim,2, no. 2 (2024): 74-87.
Ahmed Yaqoub AlMaazmi is an assistant professor of history at New York University Abu Dhabi. His research focuses on the intersection of empire, law, the occult sciences, and the environment across the Western Indian Ocean. He can be reached by email at a.almaazmi@nyu.edu or on Twitter @Ahmed_Yaqoub. Listeners’ feedback, questions, and book suggestions are most welcome.
NBN Episodes hosted by Ahmed:
August 5, 2026
Muslims and the Minority Question across the Indian Ocean
In this conversation, we are entering an Indian Ocean world connected by steamships, telegraphs, pilgrimage routes, and print. From Bombay and the Gul…
June 20, 2026
Comrades Estranged
In 1975, Kuwaiti workers orchestrated arguably the most powerful citizen-led movement for noncitizen rights in the history of the Persian Gulf. Their …
February 22, 2026
Islamic Ecumene
The essays in Islamic Ecumene: Comparing Muslim Societies (Cornell UP, 2023) address the ways in which Muslims from Morocco to Indonesia and from sub-…
January 7, 2026
Serendipitous Translations
Sri Lanka has long sat astride the monsoon winds between the Bay of Bengal and the Arabian Sea – a small island at the centre of a very big story. For…
November 6, 2025
Monsoon Voyagers: An Indian Ocean History
Monsoon Voyagers follows the voyage of a single dhow (sailing vessel), the Crooked, along with its captain and crew, from Kuwait to port cities around…
August 16, 2025
A Sea of Wealth
A Sea of Wealth: The Omani Empire and the Making of an Oceanic Marketplace (U California Press, 2025) is a sweeping retelling of the Omani position in…
December 18, 2024
Zanzibari Muslim Moderns
Zanzibari Muslim Moderns: Islamic Paths to Progress in the Interwar Period (Oxford UP, 2024) is a historical study of Zanzibar during the interwar yea…
July 21, 2024
Making Space for the Gulf
The Persian Gulf has long been a contested space--an object of imperial ambitions, national antagonisms, and migratory dreams. The roots of these cont…
July 6, 2024
American Aurora
American Aurora: Environment and Apocalypse in the Life of Johannes Kelpius (Oxford UP, 2024) explores the impact of climate change on early modern ra…
June 25, 2024
A Primer for Teaching Indian Ocean World History
A Primer for Teaching Indian Ocean World History: Ten Design Principles (Duke UP, 2024) is a guide for college and high school educators who are teach…
January 14, 2024
Hajj Across Empires
In Hajj Across Empires: Pilgrimage and Political Culture After the Mughals, 1739-1857 (Cambridge UP, 2023), Rishad Choudhury presents a new history of…
December 9, 2023
Another Look at Congolese History
Another Look at Congolese History: Arabic and Swahili Documents in the Belgian Archives (Académie Royale des Sciences d’Outre-Mer, 2020), edited by Xa…
December 4, 2023
Beyond Colonial Rupture
Scholarly discussions on Islam in print have focused predominantly on the role of Urdu in the development of North Indian Muslim publics (Dubrow, 2018…
November 25, 2023
Africanism
Anti-blackness has until recently been a taboo topic within Arab society. This began to change when Nader Kadhem, a prominent Arab and Muslim thinker …
November 11, 2023
Corporeal Life of Seafaring
The body of the seafarer is a fulcrum upon which global systems of power, longstanding maritime traditions, and gendered and racialised pressures all …
October 29, 2023
Persian and Arabic Literary Communities in the Seventeenth Century
A wealth of scholarship has highlighted how commercial, political and religious networks expanded across the Arabian Sea during the seventeenth centur…
September 27, 2023
The Medieval Persian Gulf
The Persian Gulf today is home to multiple cosmopolitan urban hubs of globalization. This did not start with the discovery of oil. The Medieval Persia…
September 16, 2023
A Book of Waves
In A Book of Waves (Duke UP, 2023), Stefan Helmreich examines ocean waves as forms of media that carry ecological, geopolitical, and climatological ne…
September 9, 2023
The Owl and the Occult
Today I talked to Divya Cherian about her article "The Owl and the Occult: Popular Politics and Social Liminality in Early Modern South Asia" publishe…
August 27, 2023
Boats in a Storm
For more than a century before World War II, traders, merchants, financiers, and laborers steadily moved between places on the Indian Ocean, trading g…
August 24, 2023
Seeking Bread and Fortune in Port Said
Lucia Carminati's book Seeking Bread and Fortune in Port Said: Labor Migration and the Making of the Suez Canal, 1859-1906 (U California Press, 2023) …
August 16, 2023
Scribal Practice and the Global Cultures of Colophons, 1400–1800
Scribal Practice and the Global Cultures of Colophons, 1400–1800 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022) is the first to chart the global diversity of colophons be…
July 27, 2023
An Introduction to the Blue Humanities
An Introduction to the Blue Humanities (Routledge, 2023) is the first textbook to explore the many ways humans engage with water, utilizing literary, …
July 23, 2023
Invoking the Invisible in the Sahara
In Invoking the Invisible in the Sahara: Islam, Spiritual Mediation, and Social Change (Cambridge UP, 2023), Erin Pettigrew utilizes invisible forces …