Faculty & Staff
Professor Intisar A. Rabb is a Professor of Law, Professor of History, and the Faculty Director of the Program in Islamic Law at Harvard Law School. She has held appointments as a Susan S. and Kenneth L. Wallach Professor at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, as an Associate Professor at NYU Department of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies and at NYU Law School, and as an Assistant Professor at Boston College Law School. She previously served as a law clerk for Judge Thomas L. Ambro of the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, as a Temple Bar Fellow in London with the American Inns of Court, and as a Carnegie Scholar for her work on contemporary Islamic law.
In 2015, in partnership with the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society, support from the Luce and MacArthur Foundations, and collaborations with myriad scholars and institutions, she launched SHARIAsource – an online portal designed to provide universal access to the world’s information on Islamic law and history, and to facilitate new research with the use of AI tools.
She has published on Islamic law in historical and modern contexts, including the monograph, Doubt in Islamic Law (Cambridge University Press 2015), the edited volumes, Justice and Leadership in Early Islamic Courts (with Abigail Balbale, Harvard University Press, 2017) and Law and Tradition in Classical Islamic Thought (with Michael Cook et al., Palgrave 2013), and numerous articles on Islamic constitutionalism, on Islamic legal canons, and on the early history of the Qur'an text.
She received a BA from Georgetown University, a JD from Yale Law School, and an MA and PhD from Princeton University. She has conducted research in Egypt, Iran, Syria, and elsewhere.
Rashid Alvi is the Executive Director of the Program in Islamic Law. He has served as a chief strategy officer, manager, and deal advisor with strategic, fiscal, and operations leadership.
He started his career at the law firm of Davis Polk & Wardwell, where he specialized in mergers and acquisitions. He then moved to Wall Street, working at Lehman Brothers and Goldman Sachs, where he advised the Goldman Sachs Investment Partners fund and the GS Principal Strategies desk on their private investments as lead transactional lawyer. He subsequently worked at two healthcare companies as Chief Strategy Officer and V.P. of Operations. In between those positions, he was the Executive Director of the Islamic Legal Studies Program at Harvard Law School, where he helped launch SHARIAsource. Mr. Alvi is also a principal at a boutique business advisory firm.
Mr. Alvi holds a J.D. from Columbia Law School, an M.A. from the University of Southern California, and a B.A. from Binghamton University.
Cole Crawford is a Senior Software Engineer in Humanities Research Computing with Arts and Humanities Research Computing (DARTH) at Harvard University, supporting the work of students, faculty, and staff in digital humanities methods and other technologies. He also works with SHARIAsource and PIL as a software engineer, DevOps and infrastructure admin, and technology consultant.
His research has been published in A History of British Working Class Literature (ed. John Goodridge and Bridget Keegan, Cambridge University Press 2017) and he has presented extensively at numerous digital humanities and research software engineering conferences. He has served on the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations and is currently on the organizing committee for DHTech.
Cole holds an ALM in Software Engineering from Harvard Extension, an MA in English (Literature & Culture) from Oregon State University, and a BS in Computing Science and Informatics and English from Creighton University.
Marzieh Noori is the Program Coordinator for the Program on Islamic Law and Faculty Assistant to Professor Intisar Rabb. Before joining Harvard Law School in 2021, she gained extensive experience in higher education institutions, primarily focusing on administration and project management, as well as in United Nations agencies in administrative and programmatic roles. She is a recipient of the Fulbright scholarship, through which she completed her Master's Degree in Higher Education from Western Michigan University. She also holds a Bachelor's Degree from the American University of Afghanistan.
Irene K. F. Kirchner is the Digital Humanities Specialist at the Program in Islamic Law. She is currently finishing her Ph.D. in the department of Arabic and Islamic Studies at Georgetown University. In her research, she uses digital methods to trace the circulation history of Hadith forgeries and the evolution of Hadith forgeries as a genre of Sunni Hadith literature. In addition to her Magister degree in Literature, Philosophy and Islamic Studies from Tübingen University, Irene obtained graduate training in Natural Language Processing, Advanced Python and the Digital Humanities. She currently serves as the director of the Islamicate Digital Humanities Network which she co-founded in 2018.
Abtsam Saleh is the Lab Coordinator and Outreach Student Fellow at the Program in Islamic Law. She is a PhD Candidate in the Study of Religion with a Data Science secondary at Harvard's Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.
Noah Tashbook is the Research Data Scientist for the SHARIAsource lab at the Program in Islamic Law. He is responsible for the development of research software and overseeing the data analytics components of the lab. He has long been involved in FOSS and information accessibility projects, including in higher education and libraries, and has previously done research in Washington, California, and throughout the Sahara region.
Cem is the Managing Editor at the Program in Islamic Law. He graduated from Harvard Law School with an LLM in 2016 and earned his doctorate (SJD) from Harvard Law School in 2024. He clerked for Judge William G. Young of the US District Court for the District of Massachusetts from 2023 to 2024 and will clerk for the Federal Court of Appeals starting in 2025. His research interests include American and comparative constitutional law, Islamic law, and its intersection with secular law. His scholarship has been published in the Yale Law Journal, International Journal of Constitutional Law, Syracuse Law Review, and the Journal of Islamic Law, among other outlets. He is currently co-authoring Afterlives of Constitutions, a forthcoming book with Harvard University Press that explores how constitutions continue to shape political and legal life after they have been formally replaced. A dual-qualified lawyer, Cem is admitted to practice law in New York and Istanbul.
Harvard Faculty & Staff Partners
William P. Alford is the Vice Dean for the Graduate Program and International Legal Studies and the Jerome A. and Joan L. Cohen Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. He is a scholar of Chinese law and legal history. He is the founding Chair of the Harvard Law School Project on Disability which provides pro bono services on issues of disability in China, Bangladesh, the Philippines, Vietnam and several other nations. He is Lead Director and Chair of the Executive Committee of the Board of Directors of Special Olympics International (which serves individuals with intellectual disabilities in more than 170 jurisdictions around the world). In 2008, Special Olympics honored him for his work for persons with intellectual disabilities in China.
Professor Alford was awarded an honorary doctorate in law by the University of Geneva in 2010 and has been an honorary professor or fellow at Renmin University of China, Zhejiang University, the National College of Administration, and the Institute of Law of the Chinese Academy of Social Science. Among other honors are the inaugural O’Melveny & Myers Centennial Award, the Kluwer China Prize, the Qatar Pearls of Praise Award, an Abe (Japan) Fellowship, and the Harvard Law School Alumni Association Award. In 2008, he was a finalist for Harvard Law School’s Sacks-Freund Teaching Award.
Professor Alford has delivered endowed lectureships at leading universities around the world and serves on university advisory boards and the editorial boards of learned journals in several jurisdictions. A member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the National Committee on US-China relations, Professor Alford has been a dispute resolution panelist under the U.S.-Canada Free Trade Agreement and the North American Free Trade Agreement. He has served as a consultant or advisor to multilateral organizations, various offices of the United States government, members of Congress, foreign governments, foundations, companies and not-for-profit organizations.
His books include To Steal a Book is an Elegant Offense: Intellectual Property Law in Chinese Civilization (Stanford University Press 1995), Raising the Bar: The Emerging Legal Profession in East Asia (Harvard East Asian Legal Studies 2007), 残疾人法律保障机制研究 (A Study of Legal Mechanisms to Protect Persons with Disabilities) (Huaxia Press 2008, with Wang Liming and Ma Yu’er), Prospects for the Professions in China (Routledge 2011, with William Kirby and Kenneth Winston) and Taiwan and International Human Rights: A Story of Transformation (Springer 2018, with Jerome Cohen and Lo Chang-fa).
Professor Alford is a graduate of Amherst College (B.A.), the University of Cambridge (LL.B.), Yale University (graduate degrees in History and in East Asian Studies) and Harvard Law School (J.D.).
Christopher T. Bavitz is the WilmerHale Clinical Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. He is also Managing Director of HLS’s Cyberlaw Clinic, based at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society. And, he is a Faculty Co-Director of the Berkman Klein Center. Chris teaches the Counseling and Legal Strategy in the Digital Age and Music & Digital Media seminars, and he concentrates his practice activities on intellectual property and media law (particularly in the areas of music, entertainment, and technology).
He oversees many of the Cyberlaw Clinic’s projects relating to copyright, speech, advising of startups, and the use of technology to support access to justice, and he serves as the HLS Dean’s Designate to Harvard’s Innovation Lab. Chris's research and related work at the Berkman Klein Center addresses intermediary liability and online content takedown regimes as well as regulatory, ethical, and governance issues associated with technologies that incorporate algorithms, machine learning, and artificial intelligence.
Chris's research and related work at the Berkman Klein Center addresses intermediary liability and online content takedown regimes as well as regulatory, ethical, and governance issues associated with algorithms, machine learning, and artificial intelligence.
Chris received his B.A., cum laude, and Certificate in Peace and Justice Studies from Tufts University in 1995 and his J.D. from University of Michigan Law School in 1998.
Matthew Cook is a Digital Scholarship Program Manager for the Harvard Library. In this role, he creates digital tools and supports faculty, staff, and students in the use of emerging computational methods. Before coming to Harvard, he worked as Head of Emerging Technologies for the University of Oklahoma Libraries. Cook’s interests include digital scholarship and 3D technologies, including virtual reality.
His work has been published in the Journal of Academic Librarianship, Journal of Library Administration, and other journals.
He holds an MLIS from the School of Library and Information Science at the University of Oklahoma.
Sarah DeMott is a Research Librarian specializing in Middle East Studies. Sarah is also Faculty Librarian for the Freshman Seminar Program for Harvard College Library for which she coordinates library outreach, information literacy, and instructional support. DeMott's areas of research specialty include working with: Qualitative Research, Digital Scholarship, and Cartography in the Humanities and Social Sciences.
Sarah received her MS and Ph.D from New York University.
Sebastian Diaz is the Berkman Klein Center's Directory of Technology and a Program Affiliate at the Program in Islamic Law.
He guides the Berkman Klein Center's IT enterprise through a landscape of ever-changing technology and priorities. Sebastian manages the technology group, which consists of a renowned development team from Harvard, an infrastructure and workplace computing team, and a technical project management team.
Sebastian provides the technical vision and process for numerous projects while challenging convention and traditional innovation. He helps bring participation, engagement, experimentation and innovation to libraries by creating platforms like the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) and the Harvard Library Lab; works with museums and collections, bridging the offline with the online with the Emily Dickinson Archive; co-creates tools for enabling access to course and curricula, with Faculty across Harvard, like Harvard Law School’s H2O project, CopyrightX, and Curricle; incubates, grows and sustains projects like Mediacloud, and the Lumen Database.
Prior to Berkman Klein, he worked as the Team Lead for the Applied Production Systems Group at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, and as a researcher and computer administrator at Williams College. He has also worked, collaborating in research, at University of New Orleans and Tulane University.
He strives to keep a diverse team and enterprise running as best possible, while setting direction and participating in the research at the Berkman Klein Center.
Sebastian received his B.A. in Biology and French Literature from Williams College and is an autodidact in computer technology.
Gayle Fischer joined the Harvard Law School Library in 2016 as the Librarian for Islamic Law. She is primarily responsible for the selection, cataloging, and management of materials for the Islamic and Middle Eastern law collections, in addition to providing reference and instruction services. As a member of the Middle East Librarians Association, she serves on the Web and Social Media Committee and the Metrics Working Group. Her professional and research interests include digital scholarship/digital humanities, ontology(-ies), and Arabic poetry.
She obtained her B.A. in Philosophy and Arabic Language and Literature from Portland State University and holds an M.A. in Middle Eastern Studies and an M.S.I.S. from the University of Texas at Austin.
Gary King is the Albert J. Weatherhead III University Professor and the Director of the Institute for Quantitative Social Science (IQSS) at Harvard University. One of the most influential political scientists of his generation, his work has been influential in fields from legislative redistricting to public health programs, and from social security to government censorship.
He is the author of several books and articles, including A Solution to the Ecological Inference Problem: Reconstructing Individual Behavior from Aggregate Data (Princeton University Press 1997) and Unifying Political Methodology: The Likelihood Theory of Statistical Inference (Cambridge University Press 1989). He is also the co-founder of several technology firms, including Crimson Hexagon (now part of Brandwatch), Learning Catalytics (now part of Pearson), OpenScholar, Perusall, and Thresher.
He graduated with his PhD from the University of Wisconsin at Madison. More information is available at King's faculty website.
Thomas Ma is a Cataloging Manager in Metadata Creation for Professional Schools at Harvard Library. He has worked in the library system at Harvard since 1999, with experience at Harvard Law School Library and other libraries.
He holds an MA and an MLIS.
Gabriel Pizzorno is a lecturer in the Department of History at Harvard University and the faculty chair of Harvard’s Digital Scholarship Support Group. His research spans a broad range of subjects, from imperialism and power centralization in the ancient Near East to aspects of personhood and dehumanization in concentration camps during the Holocaust. These diverse research interests are joined by two common threads: a focus on material culture as historical source, and the use of advanced digital tools to enable the exploration and interrogation of large and complex datasets. Pizzorno’s work attempts to bridge the gap between the detailed enquiry necessary to comprehend small-scale phenomena and the overarching syntheses required to place them in their proper historical context.
Before joining the History Department at Harvard in 2014, Pizzorno received a PhD in Art and Archaeology of the Mediterranean World from the University of Pennsylvania.
Martha Whitehead is the Vice President for the Harvard Library and University Librarian, and Roy E. Larsen Librarian for the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, at Harvard University. Before coming to Harvard, she was the Vice-Provost (Digital Planning) and University Librarian at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario. She also worked for 19 years at the University of British Columbia Library in Vancouver. Whitehead is the past president of the Canadian Association of Research Libraries (CARL), and she received CARL Distinguished Service to Research Librarianship Award in 2019.
Her work has been published in the Journal of Academic Librarianship and other journals, and she holds a BA and MLS from the University of British Columbia.
Jonathan Zittrain is the George Bemis Professor of International Law at Harvard Law School and the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, and Professor of Computer Science at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. He is also the Director of the Harvard Law School Library and Vice Dean for Library and Information Resources, and he is Co-Founder, Director, and Faculty Chair of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society.
Zittrain conducts research, writes, and teaches courses on cyber law, intellectual property, privacy law, artificial intelligence, and other topics. He is the author of The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It (Yale University Press 2008), and his articles have appeared in academic journals, including the Harvard Law Review, Harvard Journal of Law and Technology, and University of Chicago Law Review, and in other publications, including The Atlantic and The New York Times.
He holds a bachelor's summa cum laude in cognitive science and artificial intelligence from Yale Universityin 1991, a J.D. magna cum laude from Harvard Law School in 1995, and a master of public administration from Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government in 1995.
More information is available on his website, www.jz.org.