Dr. Waleed Ziad is Associate Professor in History at Georgetown University-Qatar. Prior to this, he was an Associate Professor in the Religious Studies Department at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and an Islamic Law and Civilization Research Fellow at Yale Law School. In the last decade, Ziad has conducted fieldwork on historical and contemporary religious movements and networks in over 140 towns across Afghanistan, Uzbekistan, and Pakistan.

His books include Hidden Caliphate: Sufi Saints beyond the Oxus and Indus (Harvard, 2021, winner of the Albert Hourani prize, the most prestigious award in Middle Eastern studies, among other awards), In the Treasure Room of the Sakra King: Votive Coinage from Gandharan Shrines (American Numismatic Society, 2022), The Extraordinary, Enchanted Lives of the Female Sufi Masters in the Afghan Empire (Harvard, exp. 2026), and Beyond the Khutba and Sikka: Sovereignty and Coinage in Sindh (in progress). His articles have appeared in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Foreign Policy and major dailies internationally. 

He completed his BA, MA/MPhil, and PhD in History at Yale, where his dissertation won the university-wide Field Prize. He has studied Persian, Arabic, Urdu, Sindhi, Uzbek, French, and Romanian.