Winner of 2022 Socio-Legal Studies Association book prize comes to Oxford as Visiting Professor

Professor Mark Fathi Massoud has been appointed a Visiting Professor at the Centre for Socio-Legal Studies in the Faculty of Law. He is a professor of politics and legal studies, and the director of legal studies, at University of California, Santa Cruz. Mark is a scholar of law and society, specializing on the functions of law and religious faith in states under crisis. He uses various empirical methods, including archival research, ethnographic fieldwork, and qualitative interviews.

His most recent book, Shari'a, Inshallah: Finding God in Somali Legal Politics (Cambridge University Press 2021), was awarded the Socio-Legal Studies Association 2022 Hart-SLSA Book Prize. The book was also named a PROSE Award Finalist for the best book in government and politics published in the previous year, Association of American Publishers. Mark’s first book, Law’s Fragile State, Colonial, Authoritarian, and Humanitarian Legacies in Sudan (Cambridge University Press, 2013) earned the 2014 Law and Society Association Herbert Jacob Book Prize and received the Honorable Mention for the C. Herman Pritchett Award for best book on law and courts, American Political Science Association.

He has also held Carnegie, Guggenheim, and Mellon Foundation Fellowships, and visiting positions at Stanford and Princeton. In April 2022, he gave the Cecil & Ida Green Lecture at the University of British Columbia; this month he is delivering the Evans-Pritchard Lectures at All Souls College, Oxford. Mark is an editor of the Cambridge Studies in Law and Society book series with Cambridge University Press. He serves on the Advisory Council of the U.S. National Science Foundation's Law and Science Dissertation Grant Program. He is a past trustee of the Law and Society Association.