Tamer El-Leithy studied Economics and Philosophy at The American University in Cairo (AUC) and then worked as an economist for an oil company. But when he read a historical novel set in 15th-century Cairo, he saw the light and discovered a passion for medieval history. This led him to graduate school, where he studied medieval Middle Eastern history, in Cambridge (UK), and Princeton. El-Leithy was a junior research fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows; he then taught at New York University's (NYU) Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies department and Johns Hopkins University’s History department before joining the Department of Arabic and Islamic Civilizations, School of Humanities and Social Sciences.

His forthcoming book, The Last New Muslims. Coptic Conversion and Religious Difference in late-medieval Egypt examines the 14th-century wave of Coptic Christian conversions to Islam, looking at both the social practices of Coptic converts and their representation in Muslim sources. 

El-Leithy’s second project is a longue-durée history of the cultural consequences of Arabization for the Coptic Christian community and religious tradition in Egypt (ca. 11th-14th centuries). The language shift from Coptic to Arabic was comparatively late (vis-à-vis other non-Muslim communities). But Arabization, as a larger project of cultural translation, ushered in many generative changes, including the emergence of new Coptic genres and disciplines and a closer entanglement with wider Arabic and Islamic contexts.