Ahmed Ragab

Profile

Ahmed Ragab joined HDS in July 2011 as the Richard T. Watson Assistant Professor of Science and Religion at Harvard Divinity School. He was a visiting lecturer at the Divinity School for the 2009 fall semester and since 2008 had been a postdoctoral fellow and then lecturer in the Department of the History of Science at Harvard. A physician, historian, and scholar of the medieval and modern Middle East, with a medical degree from Cairo University and a doctorate in the history of science from the Ecole Pratiques des Hautes Etudes in Paris, he was a researcher at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique in Cairo, where he directed the organization's Science and Religion and the History of Science programs. In 2008, he was a researcher for the project "Public Policies, Professional Practices and Agents' Conduct Regarding the Risk of Avian Flu (Egypt, France, India, Niger, UK, Vietnam)." From 2003 to 2007, he served as a physician at the Kasr al-Aini Cairo University Teaching Hospital. Ragab's work includes the history and development of medieval Islamic sciences, the relationship between science and religion in the medieval and modern Middle East, the history of medieval Islamic hospitals, and the intellectual and cultural history of women in the region. He has completed monographic studies of institutionalization and modernization in medieval and early modern science or medicine within Islamic cultures and he writes on contemporary questions at the foundations of science and religion. Ragab is also the author of numerous articles and papers and is completing two book projects, "Science and Religion in Medieval Egypt" and "Anatomy, Medicine, and Religion in the Ottoman Middle East," both of which are set for publication in 2011. He is also a member of the Commission on History of Science and Technology in Islamic Societies.