Amina Elbendary is associate professor of Middle East history at the Sheikh Hassan Abbas Sharbatly Department of Arab and Islamic Civilizations, the American University in Cairo. Her research interests include Mamluk social and cultural history, Arabic historiography, and Islamic political thought.

Her publications include the monograph Crowds and Sultans: Urban Protest in Late Medieval Egypt and Syria (AUC Press). The book explores reports of urban protest and dissent in the cities of Egypt and Syria under the late Mamluk and early Ottoman regimes and analyses both the historiography of protest and the intricacies of urban politics in the late medieval period. She is also the co-author (with Dalia Said Mostafa) of The Egyptian Coffeehouse: Culture, Politics and Urban Space (I.B. Tauris). She is currently working on a research project related to popularization and late medieval historiography. 

Elbendary earned her PhD in Oriental Studies from Clare Hall, University of Cambridge (2007). Before studying at Cambridge, she studied at AUC, earning a master's degree in Arabic studies with a specialization in Middle East history for her thesis “Histories of the Muslim Hero: Medieval and Modern Perceptions of al-Zahir Baybars” (1999) and a bachelor's degree in political science (suma cum laude, 1996). At AUC, she was a recipient of the Riyochi Sasakawa Young Leaders Graduate Fellowship. She was also the winner of the Middle East Medievalists award for best graduate paper on a medieval topic in 1998.