About

John M. Willis is a historian of the modern Middle East, the Arabian Peninsula, and Muslim South Asia in a global register. He is currently employed as an associate professor of history at the University of Colorado, Boulder. His research interests include state formation in Yemen, Islam and interwar internationalism, traditions of Islamic reformist thought, questions of East-East translation in relation to the South Asian poet Muhammad Iqbal, and Yemen’s socialist tradition. Willis's academic journey was influenced by the acceleration of American overseas militarism at the end of the Cold War, particularly the first Gulf War, which motivated his engagement with the histories of empire, global intellectual exchange, and religious thought. His educational background includes studies at Jefferson Community College, the University of Louisville, Georgetown University, and New York University. Beyond his academic pursuits, Willis is also a musician, playing experimental rock guitar, and enjoys watching classic Bollywood films from the 60s and 70s, cooking, and spending time with his spouse and cats. In 2000, he was a researcher at al-Markaz al-Watani li-l-Tawthiq in Say’un, Hadramawt, Yemen.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Sociology
• Law
• History
• Art
• Computer Science
• Humanities
• World Wide Web
• Ancient history
• Physics
• Philosophy
• Media studies
• Library science
• Art history
• Political economy
• Archaeology
• Economic history

Selected publications

• Meat Together: South Asian Muslim Visions of Sovereignty in the Age of Minority

  Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient · 2025-11-24

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract Roy Bar Sadeh’s “Meat Together” offers a compelling vision of intercommunal sociability in nineteenth-century India based on a reading of Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan’s writing on the legal rules governing the slaughter of animals for meat. Bar Sadeh’s analysis also gives us pause, however, to consider the emergence of life, both human and non-human, as a problem of colonial governance. Taken together, biopolitical government and the question of sociability, the article allows to interrogate the limits of hospitality as it extends to and beyond the human.

  PublisherDOI

• Sunni chauvinism and the roots of Muslim modernism

  Politics Religion & Ideology · 2024-10-15

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Burying Mohamed Ali Jauhar: The Life and Death of the Meccan Republic

  Arabian Humanities · 2023 · 11 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Sociology
  • Political Science

  This article looks at the hitherto ignored project by the Indian Khilafat Movement to establish a republican government in the city of Mecca after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. It argues that while activists of the Khilafat Movement were able to articulate an ethical vision of a transnational state rooted in the Islamic concept of fraternity (ikhvat), they were unable to effectively bring this vision to bear on the domain of the political, especially in the confrontation with the emerging power of the Saudi state and its intellectual allies.

  PublisherDOI

• Sovereign Power and “Other Lives”

  Journal of the Canadian Historical Association · 2022

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Humanities
  • Political Science

  Sovereign Power and “Other Lives”. Un article de la revue Journal of the Canadian Historical Association / Revue de la Société historique du Canada (Volume 32, numéro 1, 2022, p. 1-171) diffusée par la plateforme Érudit.

  PublisherDOI

• <i>Dislocating the Orient: British Maps and the Making of the Middle East, 1854–1921</i>. By Daniel Foliard.Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017. Pp. vi+336. $60.00 (cloth); $10.00 to $60.00 (e-book).

  The Journal of Modern History · 2020

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Political Science
  • Computer Science
  PublisherDOI

• Asher Orkaby, Beyond the Arab Cold War: The International History of the Yemen Civil War, 1962–68, Oxford Studies in International History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017). Pp. 312. $34.95 cloth. ISBN: 9780190618445

  International Journal Middle East Studies · 2019-11-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Asher Orkaby, Beyond the Arab Cold War: The International History of the Yemen Civil War, 1962–68, Oxford Studies in International History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017). Pp. 312. $34.95 cloth. ISBN: 9780190618445 - Volume 51 Issue 4

  PublisherDOI

• Topological Foundations of Tropical Geometry

  CU Scholar (University of Colorado Boulder) · 2019-01-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  We construct two subcanonical Grothendieck Topologies on the category of commutative, integral monoids and show that the moduli space of tropical curves is a stack in both topologies. We additionally construct two subcanonical topologies on the category of sharp, saturated, integral, commutative monoids with an eye towards answering outstanding questions of algebraicity of tropical moduli problems.

  PublisherOA PDF

• Tango along the Canadian–American Border in the 1920s

  The American Review of Canadian Studies · 2018-04-03

  article1st authorCorresponding

  From 1920 until 1933, American Prohibition altered relations between Canada and the United States. Prohibition contributed to the advent of an underground liquor economy predicated on a pattern of widespread cross-border smuggling and forced the agencies overseeing the border to bring the situation under control. I examine Canadian and American customs organizations with especial focus on the Québec–New York State and Vermont border. The pressure on Canada’s Customs and Excise Department was strong. The US government wanted to ban Canadian liquor imports. Members of the Canadian liquor cartel wanted the exact reverse. The Canadian department, sensitive to the prosperity of the unprecedented rise in Canada’s liquor production, was overwhelmed by the scope of illegal liquor activities. Moreover, under the influence of the liquor economy, Customs and Excise experienced corruption within its ranks. The period of prohibition was one of tension, along the border, between police and smugglers, and between countries with different interests and priorities. It is a significant episode in an ongoing relationship (or dance) between close partners.

  PublisherDOI

• The Salafī Imāmate: Moral Reform and Anti-Imperialism in the Mutawakkilite Kingdom

  Journal of Arabian Studies · 2018-01-02

  article1st authorCorresponding

  This article reassesses the reign of Imām Yaḥyā Ḥamīd Al-Dīn (r. 1904–48), the historiography of which has emphasized its perceived political, economic, and intellectual isolation. In contrast to this view, this article situates the rise of Imām Yaḥyā and the formation of the Mutawakklite Kingdom of Yemen in interwar movements of anti-imperialism and moral reform that were global in ambition and reach. Rather than remaining isolated from broader political and intellectual trends, Imām Yaḥyā actively engaged the reformist project of the Sunnī-salafī movement through the growing medium of the trans-regional Arabic press and the post-Ottoman associational life of the interwar Muslim congresses.

  PublisherDOI

• Considerations for secure and resilient satellite architectures

  2017-11-01 · 9 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Traditionally, the focus of security and ensuring confidentiality, integrity, and availability of data in spacecraft systems has been on the ground segment and the uplink/downlink components. Although these are the most obvious attack vectors, potential security risks against the satellite's platform is also a serious concern. This paper discusses a notional satellite architecture and explores security vulnerabilities using a systems-level approach. Viewing attacks through this paradigm highlights several potential attack vectors that conventional satellite security approaches fail to consider. If left undetected, these could yield physical effects limiting the satellite's mission or performance. The approach presented aids in risk analysis and gives insight into architectural design considerations which improve the system's overall resiliency.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Suvi Μ. Virtanen

  Finnish Institute for Health and Welfare

  14 shared

• I.V. Herbert

  Ministry of Health

  12 shared

• Logan O. Mailloux

  8 shared

• Jill M. Norris

  University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus

  8 shared

• Gareth Edwards

  8 shared

• Åke Lernmark

  8 shared

• Katharina Warncke

  München Klinik Schwabing

  7 shared

• Joanna Stock

  University of South Florida

  7 shared

Labs

• John M. Willis LabPI

Education

• B.A.

  University of Louisville

• M.A., Arab Studies

  Georgetown University

• Ph.D., History and Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies

  New York University

Awards & honors

• Social Science Research Council support
• Fulbright program support
• Gerda Henkel Stiftung support
• National Humanities Center support