Aziz Rana is a Non-Resident Fellow at the Quincy Institute and Professor of Law at Cornell University. His research and teaching center on American constitutional law and political development. In particular, his work focuses on how shifting notions of race, citizenship, and empire have shaped legal and political identity since the founding.
He is the author of The Two Faces of American Freedom (2010), a book that 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. His current book manuscript, Rise of the Constitution, explores the modern rise 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 Boston Review, n+1, New Labor Forum, The Chronicle of Higher Education, The Nation, The New York Times, Salon, CNN, Huffington Post, and Jacobin. He has recently published articles and chapter contributions with Yale University Press, The University of Chicago Law Review, California Law Review, and Texas Law Review, among others.
Rana received his BA from Harvard College, his JD from Yale Law School, and his PhD in political science from Harvard University.