We are pleased to announce that Dr. Ahmed Ragab has accepted our offer to join the faculty at Johns Hopkins as Associate Professor in the Department of the History of Medicine, concluding our search for a tenure-track faculty member in the history of premodern medicine.
Ragab will be joining us from Williams College, where he is currently the Richmond Visiting Professor of Science and Technology Studies. He received his MD from Cairo University in 2005 and his PhD from the Ecole Practique des Hautes Etudes in 2010. As many of you know, Ragab’s research on the history of science, medicine, and culture in the Islamic world includes work on the history of medieval Islamic hospitals, and research on the epistemic authority of medieval Muslim women with a focus on women-reporters of prophetic traditions, and recent work on the history of temporality and disease. He has also worked on sex and gender differentiation in medical thought in the region, on the development of anatomy and dissection, and their relation to religious practices in the Ottoman context and investigates medical thinking and physician-patient encounters in the medieval and early modern context.
Ahmed’s work is shaped by critical race theory, postcolonial and decolonial studies and queer theory. While his work addresses questions of medical cultures in the medieval and early modern Islamic world, he is also interested in the impact of such cultures on contemporary Muslims, especially regarding the place of science and medicine in the US global empire, and in the lived experiences of minorities and diasporic communities in the US and Western Europe.
Ahmed, his partner Soha Bayoumi, and their daughter Carmen are looking forward to getting to know you better once they move to Baltimore this summer—with hopes that we might all get to see each other for in-person classes and colloquia in the Fall. For now, please join us in welcoming Ahmed to the Department of the History of Medicine and the Program in the History of Science, Medicine, and Technology.