Academic Bio
Amir A. Toft is a Ph.D. candidate in Islamic Thought. His research interests are in Islamic jurisprudence and Ottoman legal history, and secondarily in the legal relations between Muslims and non-Muslims in the early modern Mediterranean. His dissertation, titled "Revaluing the Price of Blood: Homicide in Islamic Jurisprudence and Ottoman Law," aims to advance scholarly understanding of how premodern Islamic legal norms were translated into concrete institutions of law and government. Amir also holds a B.A. in economics from Northwestern University, a seminary degree (ʿAlimiyya) from the Institute of Islamic Education, and an M.LS. from the University of Chicago Law School. His studies and research so far have been supported by the American Research Institute in Turkey and by the Kamel Center for the Study of Islamic Law and Civilization at Yale Law School, where he spent the 2017–18 academic year as a research fellow.