Students
Omar Abdel-Ghaffar is a JD-PhD student at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies and History Department. His research interests are in late medieval Islamic legal and social history, with a particular interest in courts and conceptions of justice. Before coming to Harvard, he completed his MA at Columbia University and his BA at UCDavis.
Ghada Amer is a J.D. candidate at Harvard Law School (Class of 2027). Prior to law school, she worked as a Specialist Legal Analyst in the Claim Monetization and Dilution practice at Kobre & Kim LLP, where she focused on cross-border asset recovery and international judgment enforcement. She holds a B.A. from Harvard College in Government and Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality.
Giovanni DiRusso is a 4th-year PhD student in the Committee on the Study of Religion. His research focuses on the intellectual history of Christianity and Islam in the medieval Middle East, and he is currently writing his dissertation on Christian Arabic apocalyptic literature. In addition to his primary research interests, Giovanni uses several machine-learning and computational tools in his study of Arabic and Islam, including OCR/HTR, text alignment, and natural-language processing. Among other tasks at PIL, Giovanni has tested and trained several machine-learning models for Arabic-language legal sources.
Sarah Lorgan-Khanyile is a JD/PhD candidate at Harvard University. She is currently on fellowship at École Normale Supérieure. As a doctoral candidate in Comparative Literature, her research interests span across Continental Philosophy, Intellectual Property Law, Constitutional Law, Disability in Literature and the Law, Theories of Blackness, Theories of the Lyric, Psychoanalysis and Trauma Theory, South African History, and English, French, German Literature from the 19th Century to Present. She works in Zulu, French, German, Spanish, Italian, and most recently, Russian and Arabic. She received her B.A. in English and Comparative Literature from Cornell University in 2021.
Hafsa is a second-year student in Harvard Divinity School, pursuing Master's in Theological Studies, with a concentration in Islamic law. Her research interests include classical jursiprudence concerning women, sexuality, and rape. Her undergraduate degree was in Public and Social Policy with a minor in computer science and statistical analysis.
Washain Kalat is a second-year Master of Theological Studies candidate at Harvard Divinity School, concentrating in Islamic Studies and Philosophy. She earned her undergraduate degree in Social Development and Public Policy, with a minor in Philosophy, from Habib University. Washain also completed a four-year program in Classical Islamic Learning at Zaynab Academy.
Jordyn Christophides is a Research Assistant at the Program in Islamic Law. She is a 1L at Harvard Law School. She graduated with a BA in Political Science and BA in Linguistics from Stony Brook University. Her undergraduate thesis, A Matter of Trust: Origins of Mistrust and Misperceptions in US-Iran Relations, studied the way collective historical trauma manifests itself in entrenched national narratives that serve to block meaningful efforts for detente between the two nations. Her research interests include Islamic Law, International Human Rights Law, and the Persianate world.
Sarah Aziz is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at Harvard University. Her fields of interest include Classical Arabic literature, Islamic intellectual history, Shiism, and Sufism. Her research examines the historical, literary, and intellectual dimensions of early Islamic prayer literature and its commentarial traditions. Sarah earned her MA in Islamic Studies from the University of Chicago Divinity School and her BA with honors in Religious Studies from Davidson College.