Get to Know: Dr. Almas Khan
By the time Almas Khan arrived at the University of Mississippi, she had already traced an academic path as mobile and cosmopolitan as her upbringing. Born in Washington state and raised across multiple regions as her parents’ work required frequent moves, Khan learned early how ideas, cultures, and institutions shift across borders. Now in her third year teaching at the University of Mississippi, she brings that transregional sensibility to classrooms where constitutional law, race, gender, and literature collide.
Almas Khan
Khan’s intellectual journey began not in law, but in language. She completed her undergraduate degree at Stanford University, earning a bachelor’s in English. Rather than seeing law as a departure from the humanities, she viewed it as a continuation of her liberal arts education, a way to extend questions about narrative, power, and meaning into institutional life. That conviction carried her to the University of Chicago Law School, where she earned her Juris Doctorate.
Yet even as she trained as a lawyer, Khan never abandoned literature. After law school, she taught and then pursued a master’s degree in English at the University of California, Irvine, before completing a Ph.D. in English at the University of Virginia. Fellowships followed, first at Georgetown University, then teaching appointments in Arkansas.
At the University of Mississippi, Khan teaches coursework in constitutional law, race, inequality, and justice that asks students to read judicial opinions alongside poems, novels, and graphic narratives. As an intellectual historian, she studies the dynamic relationship between legal and literary movements for equal citizenship in the post-Civil War United States. Her scholarship examines how creative forms of legal dissent, from court opinions to lyric poetry, have sparked moments of constitutional reimagination, particularly within African American, working-class, women’s, and queer communities.
“I love the research itself,” Khan says. “Bunkering down and doing 12 hours of research a day, it allows me to do scholarship and be a better teacher.” That commitment to deep archival and textual work is precisely what her Isom Fellowship recognizes. For Khan, the fellowship signals that the institution values sustained, rigorous inquiry, especially research that centers people historically pushed to the margins.
Her current projects reflect that focus. One examines African women’s poetry within the context of the Black Lives Matter movement, tracing how global Black feminist voices engage U.S. racial politics. Another major article contributes to a collection on gender history in the law, while a separate essay analyzes race and the campus novel for an edited volume on race and humor. Across these works, Khan consistently foregrounds figures whose identities, or whose movement across disciplines, have excluded them from conventional legal histories.
Beyond publishing, Khan is deeply invested in mentorship. She advises students participating in Michigan State University College of Law’s Gender and Sexuality Moot Court Competition, where teams argue complex points of law under pressure.
Dr. Khan is a 2024-2026 Isom Fellow.