Ahmad worked at several U.S. universities between 1966 and 2003, including
Columbia University and
Harvard University. He was
Emeritus Professor of history at the University of Massachusetts at Boston. From 2006 he taught at Yeditepe University,
Istanbul.
An Annotated Chronology of Multi-Party Politics in Turkey (1976, with Bedia Turgay Ahmad);
From Unionism to Kemalism, Essays (1985);
Turkish Experiment in Democracy (1994);
The Making of Modern Turkey (1995);
Turkey: The Quest for Identity (2006);
From Empire to Republic: Essays on the Late Ottoman Empire and Modern Turkey (2008); and
The Young Turks and the Ottoman Nationalities: Armenians, Greeks, Albanians, Jews, and Arabs, 1908–1918 (2014). In
From Empire to Republic: Essays on the Late Ottoman Empire and Modern Turkey Ahmad argued that the reports of the
British Foreign Office and of the Istanbul correspondents of
The Times newspaper, and the conservative
publications in the Ottoman Empire are the roots of the popular
anti-semitic conspiracy theories in Turkey.{{cite journal|author=Marc David Baer|author-link=Marc David Baer|title=An Enemy Old and New: The Dönme, Anti-Semitism, and Conspiracy Theories in the Ottoman Empire and Turkish Republic|journal=
The Jewish Quarterly Review|date=Fall 2013 ==Personal life and death==