R. Stephen Humphreys is an American historian specializing in the history of Southwest Asia and North Africa. He was the 'Abd al-Aziz al-Sa'ud Professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara and is now an emeritus professor at that institution.
Humphreys received a PhD from the University of Michigan in 1969.
Humphreys' Between Memory and Desire: The Middle East in a Troubled Age has been widely reviewed and cited as a good introductory work on the region. He has also written a history of the Ayyubids, From Saladin to the Mongols (1977), and a biography of the first Umayyad caliph, Mu'awiya I, Mu'awiya ibn abi Sufyan: From Arabia to Empire (2006).
A festschrift was published in Humphreys' honor by the Darwin Press based on lectures given at a conference at the College of St. Benedict in Minnesota.