Mario M. Ruiz is Associate Professor of Modern Middle East History at Hofstra University in New York. He earned his PhD in History from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, an MA in Regional Area Studies (Middle East) at Harvard University, and a BA in History/Diplomacy and World Affairs at Occidental College. His current book project draws on criminal cases from the Egyptian and British national archives to study juridical and temporal-spatial formations of violence in nineteenth and early twentieth-century Egypt. His research and teaching interests focus on the origins of modern law, commodity cultures in the Ottoman Middle East, imperial regimes in the First World War, silent film and Egyptian cinema, and global environmental histories. He has published articles in Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, Middle Eastern Studies, Middle East Critique, Jerusalem Quarterly, International Journal of Middle East Studies, and contributed essays on martial law and criminal in edited volumes such as The Great War in the Middle East and The Long 1890s in Egypt.