Alan Mikhail

God's Shadow was published by Liveright/W.W. Norton in 2020. The book argues for the central place of the Ottoman Empire in world history using the life and times of Selim I, the empire's ninth sultan. The book garnered over forty positive reviews and several critical ones. It was given starred reviews in Library Journal, Kirkus, and Publishers Weekly. It won the Gold Medal in World History from the Independent Publisher Book Awards and was named an Editor’s Choice by The New York Times. It was also was a finalist for the Connecticut Book Award and was longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence.

In 2018, he received the Anneliese Maier Research Award of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation.

Under Osman's Tree, published by University of Chicago Press in 2017, received critical acclaim and was awarded the M. Fuat Köprülü Book Prize of the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association for the best book in that field.

The Animal in Ottoman Egypt, published in 2014 by Oxford University Press, examines Egypt's changing place in the Ottoman Empire and world economy from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries through the lens of human-animal relations. Scholarly reception was mixed. It received the Gustav Ranis International Book Prize, awarded for the best book on an international topic by a Yale ladder faculty member.

Water on Sand: Environmental Histories of the Middle East and North Africa, published by Oxford University Press in 2013, was met with positive reviews.

His first monograph, Nature and Empire in Ottoman Egypt (2011), was a part of the Cambridge University Press series Studies in Environment and History. Based on his doctoral dissertation, the book argues for using an environmental lens to understand relations between the Ottoman Empire and the province of Egypt. It received a positive reception and won the Roger Owen Book Award from MESA for the best book in a two-year period in economics, economic history, or the political economy of the Middle East and North Africa.

He served as a postdoctoral scholar at Stanford University for two years, before becoming an assistant professor of history at Yale University in 2010. In 2013, he was promoted to full professor and became department chair in 2018.

Mikhail graduated in History and Chemistry from Rice University in 2001, and received his MA in history from the University of California, Berkeley in 2003. His PhD was conferred from the same university in 2008. His thesis The Nature of Ottoman Egypt: Irrigation, Environment, and Bureaucracy in the Long Eighteenth Century was awarded the Malcolm H. Kerr Dissertation Award in the Social Sciences (2009) by Middle East Studies Association of North America (MESA).

Alan Mikhail (born 1979) is an American historian who is currently the Chace Family Professor of History at Yale University. His work centers on the history of the Ottoman Empire.