Aziz Rana is the J. Donald Monan, S.J., University Professor of Law and Government. He joins Boston College from Cornell Law School, where he was the Richard and Lois Cole Professor of Law.
His research and teaching center on American constitutional law and political development. In particular, Rana鈥檚 work focuses on how shifting notions of race, citizenship, and empire have shaped legal and political identity since the founding of the country.
His first book,听The Two Faces of American Freedom听(Harvard University Press) situates the American experience within the global history of colonialism, examining the intertwined relationship in American constitutional practice between internal accounts of freedom and external projects of power and expansion.听His latest book,听The Constitutional Bind: How Americans Came to Idolize a Document that Fails Them听(University of Chicago Press, 2024), explores the modern emergence of constitutional veneration in the twentieth century -- especially against the backdrop of growing American global authority -- and how veneration has influenced the boundaries of popular politics.
Rana has written essays and op-eds for such venues as听n+1,听Dissent,听The Boston Review,听The Washington Post,听The New York Times,听 New Labor Forum,听Jacobin,听The Guardian,听The Chronicle of Higher Education,听The Nation,听Jadaliyya,听Salon, and The Law and Political Economy Blog.听He has articles and chapter contributions published or forthcoming with听Yale听and听Oxford University Presses,听The University of Chicago Law Review,听California Law Review,听UCLA Law Review,听Texas Law Review, and the听Yale Law Journal Forum, among others.
Rana is an editorial board member of Dissent, The Law and Political Economy Blog, and Just Security. He is also a Life Member of the Council of Foreign Relations and a Non-Resident Fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft.听
鈥婬e received his A.B. from Harvard College summa cum laude and his J.D. from Yale Law School. He earned a Ph.D. in political science at Harvard University, where his dissertation was awarded the University's Charles Sumner Prize.
听
Recent Media & Appearances
