Ahmed Y. AlMaazmi

Ahmed Yaqoub AlMaazmi studies coastal and transoceanic movements of practices, institutions, ideas, commodities, and people across the seaborne Omani empire. He aims to examine the intersection of colonial securitization, native thalassocracy, and transcultural networks to analyze how they affect notions of sovereignty, borderization, identity, and the processes of diaspora-making in the Middle East as an integral part of the Indian Ocean world.

Born and raised in Sharjah, Ahmed graduated from Zayed University with a B.A. (Hons) in international studies. After interning with the United Nations World Food Programme and studying cultural anthropology at Rutgers University as a Fulbright fellow, he enrolled at Princeton University to pursue a doctorate degree in the Department of Near Eastern Studies.

Utilizing multilingual archival research—while drawing from history, anthropology, and human geography—Ahmed seeks to identify the relational patterns and interplay between native-governance and politico-naval imperialism. Accordingly, he is documenting and analyzing the historical memory and the geopolitical making of the modern Omani Sea—from the Strait of Hormuz to the Arabian Sea—situated as a translocal linchpin environmentally interconnecting and socially binding the opposite littorals to answer questions related to genealogies of decolonization and subalternity, lineages of migration and borderlands, nationhood and state-formation.

Apart from his graduate academic interests, Ahmed developed an eclectic range of curiosities over the years that include: Arabic and Iranian linguistics; early and medieval Islamic theology and history; Arabic, Kurdish, Persian, Balochi, Pashto, Brahui, Urdu, Sindhi, Punjabi, and Swahili literatures; ethnic and cultural studies; folk music; culinary and gardening arts; youth culture in the UAE and Oman.