Professor Ali Abdullatif Ahmida was born in Waddan, Libya and educated at Cairo University in Egypt and The University of Washington, Seattle. He is the founding chair and professor, Department of Political Science at the University of New England, Biddeford, Maine, USA. His areas of expertise are political theory, comparative politics, and historical sociology. His scholarship focuses on power, agency and anti-colonial resistance, and genocide in North Africa, especially in modern Libya.
Dr. Ahmida has published major articles in Italian Studies, International Journal of Middle East Studies, Arab Future, Third World Quarterly, Italian Studies, Journal of African History, and the Arab Journal of International Studies. He is also the author of The Making of Modern Libya: State Formation, Colonialization and Resistance, a book published by SUNY Press, 1994, 2009. This book was translated into Arabic and has been published in a second edition by the Center of Arab Unity Studies, 1998, Beirut, Lebanon. A third edition is due out in 2013. He is the editor of Beyond Colonialism and Nationalism in the Maghreb: History, Culture and Politics, published by Palgrave Press in 2000. An Arabic translation of the book was published in 2014.
Routledge Press published Dr. Armida’s book, Forgotten Voices: Power and Agency in Colonial and Postcolonial Libya, 2005; an Arabic edition was published in 2009, and an Italian edition will be published in 2013. Cambridge Scholars Press has published his edited book, Bridges across the Sahara, September 2009, and The Center of Arab Unity Studies, Beirut, Lebanon, published his book Post-Orientalism: Critical Reviews of North African Social and Cultural History in August 2009. In addition he has published two other books: The Libya We do not Know, 2013, and The Libyan Novel, 2019. Dr. Ahmida has just finished a new original book based on the survivors’ oral history of the forgotten genocide in colonial Libya, Genocide in Libya: Shar, A Hidden Colonial History Routledge Press, August 2020.
Professor Ahmida has lectured in a variety of U.S., Canadian, European, Middle Eastern and African universities and colleges. He has contributed several book reviews, articles and chapters to books on the African state, identity and alienation, and class and state formation in modern Libya. He has received many academic grants and awards such as the Social Science Research Council national grant award, the Philip Shehade New Writer’s Award in 1994 and the Kenneally Cup for distinguished academic service of the year at University of New England in 2003. In May 2010, he was awarded the Ludcke Chair of Liberal Arts and Sciences for 2010-11 for excellence in teaching and scholarship at the University of New England. In November 2022, his book Genocide in Libya won AIMS 2022 L. Carl Brown book prize.
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