Abdulaziz Alotaibi is a doctoral student in the Department of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania. His research interests span various aspects of political thought and philosophy, encompassing Jewish and Islamic Political Thought, Ancient Greek philosophy, its subsequent critique, and resurgence by later modern thinkers, as well as the comparative politics of the Middle East, with a particular focus on political Islam and the functioning of monarchies within the modern nation-state context.
Before joining the University of Pennsylvania, Abdulaziz completed his M.Phil at the University of Cambridge, where he was a graduate fellow at Christ's College. During his time there, he studied the conception and reception of tyranny in early Islamic political thought and how it relates to the normative framework of contemporary political Islam.
Prior to Cambridge, Abdulaziz did his undergraduate study in the US, where he studied Greek, Latin, and Hebrew, while majoring in Political Science at San Diego State University and graduated Summa Cum Laude. In his undergraduate study, Abdulaziz built on what he learned before in the traditional setting of classical Islamic education in Kuwait where he focused on Islamic law, theology, and philosophy (fiqh, Kalam, and Hikma)."