Mark Fathi Massoud is Director of the Legal Studies Program and Associate Professor of Politics and Legal Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz (USA). Massoud’s research and teaching address the interplay between religion, law, and politics. His second book is Shari’a, Inshallah: Recovering the Rule of Law in Somalia’s Islamic State (under contract, Cambridge Univ. Press). He is the author of Law’s Fragile State: Colonial, Authoritarian, and Humanitarian Legacies in Sudan, which received LSA’s Herbert Jacob Book Award. Massoud has participated in LSA conferences since 2007 and has twice served on LSA’s best undergraduate and graduate student paper award committees. He serves on the boards of Law & Society Review, Law & Policy, Law & Social Inquiry, and the International Journal of Law in Context; he is also co-editor of the Cambridge Studies in Law and Society book series. Committed to delivering on LSA’s goal of encouraging mentoring, he co-organized the sociolegal studies early career writing workshop in Africa (2019 and 2017) and has organized LSA conference panels on publishing practices, fieldwork, and the peer review process. Born in Sudan and raised in California, Massoud holds a JD and PhD from UC Berkeley’s jurisprudence and social policy program. He has been a visiting fellow of Stanford University’s Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law, Princeton University’s Program in Law and Public Affairs, and the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies and Nuffield College, Oxford University. He received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2015.

Twitter: @ProfMassoud