Dr. Abdullah M. Awad is the director of the Institute for Critical Thought, an independent center for research, teaching, and public engagement in Jordan. His work moves across the critical humanities, interpretive social sciences, and Arab-Islamic intellectual traditions, exploring how inherited forms of thought may speak to contemporary ethical, political, and technological questions. He holds a PhD from the University of Cambridge, where he was a Herchel Smith Fellow, and was a Fellow in History at Harvard University.
Teaching is central to his practice. At ICT, he has designed seminars across philosophy, psychoanalysis, literature, and social theory, grounded in close reading and cross-disciplinary conversation. At Cambridge, he taught papers on social theory, empire and colonialism, and the politics of race and ethnicity. His pedagogical work extends to curriculum development in Jordan, notably through Istijarah, a project developing virtue ethics-based materials for national schools.
This formation has taken institutional shape through the Scholar's Program, a graduate diploma he launched in 2025. The program embodies his conviction that serious intellectual formation requires sustained community, close reading, and the freedom to move across disciplinary boundaries outside the strictures of contemporary academia. Its success has become the foundation for ICT's current transition into a liberal arts university, the first of its kind in the Arab world.
Awad's research has appeared in venues as varying as Nature, Frontiers in Public Health, and Jadaliyya, and he has received research grants from the Arts and Humanities Research Council, UK Research and Innovation, and the Templeton Foundation. He lectures internationally — from Rhodes House, Oxford and the Sharq Forum in Istanbul to Tehran's Sharif University and Tsinghua University in Beijing — on topics ranging from human flourishing to mathematics and speculative philosophy.
In recent years, his work has opened onto artificial intelligence and ethics. At ICT, he is developing a research program that brings Arab-Islamic philosophical resources, including the concept of nafs and the work of al-Ghazali, into conversation with contemporary debates on digital minds, attending to the philosophical questions raised by AI and to how emerging technologies are understood across different cultural worlds.
His intellectual life has also been shaped by the arts. He has exhibited his work on aesthetics, exile, and the politics of art-making in Amman, Beirut, London, and São Paulo, and has been involved in a range of creative cultural projects. A former Thomas J. Watson Fellow, he spent a year traveling across India, China, and Brazil exploring the relation between exile and aesthetics, a thread that continues to inform his thinking on pedagogy and politics.