Professional Biography

Aziz Rana received his A.B. summa cum laude from Harvard College and his J.D. from Yale Law School. He also earned a Ph.D. in political science at Harvard, where his dissertation was awarded the university's Charles Sumner Prize. Prior to joining the Cornell faculty, he was an Oscar M. Ruebhausen Fellow in Law at Yale. His writing and research centers on American constitutional law and political development, with a particular interest in the intersection of citizenship with topics in national security and immigration. His book, "The Two Faces of American Freedom" (2010), was published by Harvard University Press and situates the American experience within the global history of colonialism, emphasizing how notions of republicanism and expansion have shaped U.S. law and politics since the founding. Rana's current book project, titled "No Other Gods: Security, Citizenship, and the Victory of Constitutional Patriotism," explores how practices of constitutional veneration became dominant in the mid-twentieth century -- particularly in the context of national security imperatives -- and how such veneration shaped the boundaries of popular politics.