Youssef Ben Ismail is a historian of the late Ottoman Empire and Modern Middle East. He received his PhD in the Histories and Cultures of Muslim Societies from Harvard University in 2021. He is currently a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Society of Fellows for the Humanities at Columbia University. As of July 2024, he will be an Assistant Professor in the Department of Law, Jurisprudence, and Social Thought at Amherst College.

His research deals with law and imperialism in the nineteenth-century Mediterranean with particular attention to the connected histories of sovereignty in Europe and the Ottoman Empire. He is currently writing a book on the French-Ottoman imperial dispute over the sovereign status of Tunis after the conquest of Algiers in 1830. The book takes the imperial rivalry over Tunis as a case-study to explore how Ottoman and European conceptions of sovereignty circulated, competed, and influenced one another across imperial legal traditions.

Other research projects include a history of French imperialism in the late Ottoman world through the study of the concept of “protection” and an aural history of Ottoman sovereignty in Tunis, Tripolitania, and Egypt.

Youssef is also the editor of a book series on the modern history of Tunisia forthcoming with Cérès Éditions (Tunis). Before joining Columbia, he taught modern middle eastern history at Harvard University and Ottoman palaeography at the University of Tunis.

For his CV and a list of his publications, see his profile on academia.edu.