Maryam Patton is an historian of the pre-modern Middle East and an expert on the cultural and intellectual history of the early Ottoman Empire. Her interests span the history and theories of time and chronological reckoning, cross-cultural transmission across the Mediterranean world, especially in the fields of book history and the history of science, and others. 

She received her PhD in History and Middle Eastern Studies from Havard University, where she wrote a dissertation on the historical understanding of time and temporality in the late medieval and early modern Ottoman Empire. She understands temporality as the lived experience of time, thus exploring how technological innovations, cultural influences, and religious and philosophical ideas shaped the concept of time. She received her MPhil in European History in 2016 from the University of Oxford, while supported by an Ertegun Scholarship, and wrote a thesis on seventeenth-century English scholars of Arabic. She holds an AB in History from Princeton University, where she graduated summa cum laude.