Mathias Ghyoot is a PhD student in Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University. He specializes in the social and intellectual history of the modern Middle East and South Asia with a particular interest in Islamism.

Mathias is the author of Brothers Behind Bars: A History of the Muslim Brotherhood from the Palestine War to Egypt’s Prisons (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2025), which tells the harrowing yet fascinating story of the Muslim Brotherhood’s imprisonment from 1948 to 1975. Drawing on hundreds of prison memoirs written by both Muslim Brothers and Sisters, the book takes the reader on a rare journey behind prison walls to show how radicals and moderates, ministers and intelligence officers, clerics and jailors, were embroiled in an epic battle to define Islam in modern Egypt. 

Mathias is also working on the edition and translation – from Arabic into English – of the lost travelogue of Sayyid Qutb (d. 1966), a prominent literary critic of Egypt and a member of the Muslim Brotherhood who visited the United States in the 1940s. This forthcoming book, tentatively titled The America I Saw: The Travel Writings of an Islamist in the Making, is under contract with Syracuse University Press.

Mathias earned an M.A. in Islamic Studies with distinction from the University of Copenhagen in 2021 and received the Nordic Society for Middle Eastern Studies (NSMES) Award for Best M.A. Thesis in 2022. He also holds a B.A. in Arabic and Religious Studies from the University of Copenhagen, and, in 2018, completed the Center for Arab and Middle Eastern Studies (CAMES) Program at the American University of Beirut. Between 2021 and 2022, Mathias was a Visiting Research Fellow at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Mathias has conducted fieldwork and archival research across North Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia, and is, together with Athina Pfeiffer, an editor and co-founder of Arsheef. He is proficient in Arabic (MSA and Egyptian/Levantine Colloquial) and Urdu.