Youssef Ben Ismail is Assistant Professor of Law, Jurisprudence, and Social Thought at Amherst College. He received his PhD in the Histories and Cultures of Muslim Societies from Harvard University in 2021. Before coming to Amherst, he was a member of the Society of Fellows for the Humanities at Columbia University (2021–2024) and taught Ottoman language and paleography at the University of Tunis.

His research and teaching interests broadly include the intellectual history of law and empire, modern Middle Eastern and North African history, and colonial and post-colonial studies. His work centers the history of the late Ottoman Empire, European imperialism, and modern North Africa to investigate the origins of the conceptual, normative, and legal frameworks that shape conventional understandings of the modern state.

His current book project, titled Between Legal Worlds: The Tunisian Question and the Making of Modern Sovereignty, examines the history of the longstanding imperial rivalry between France and the Ottoman Empire over the sovereign status of the so-called “Regency of Tunis” in the nineteenth century. The French-Ottoman rivalry over Tunis forced both empires to write about the boundaries and attributes of state sovereignty in unprecedented ways. Drawing on archival research in Arabic, Ottoman Turkish, French, and Italian, Between Legal Worlds takes the dispute over the status of Tunis as a case-study to explore how different conceptions of sovereignty and statehood circulated, competed, and influenced one another across legal-epistemological traditions.

Other research projects include a global legal history of the concept of “protection” (of people, properties, territories) around the imperial mediterranean and a project on the aural dimensions of Ottoman sovereign authority.

See his profile on academia.edu for a recent CV and a list of publications.