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.
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.
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.
Sage Dawes is a Student Editor at the Program in Islamic Law and a 1L at Harvard Law School. She holds a Bachelor of Arts in Political Science from New York University Abu Dhabi with minors in Legal Studies and Psychology. Her research interests include International Human Rights, Islamic Law, and International Women's Law.