Posted on July 11, 2021

An Unprecedented Academic Year Begins The community at Harvard Law School and the Program in Islamic Law continues to gather and work not in spite of the disruptions caused by the pandemics of health and racial justice, but in light of them. We welcome back all students and scholars joining us – from here in Cambridge to cities across the world – all Zooming in. We have an exciting lineup of new data science projects and programming that turn out to be remarkably well-suited to these remote times. The silver lining of this pandemic playbook is a new impetus to embrace technology in ways that accelerate our ability to develop and more broadly share access to knowledge, build new digital platforms for collaborative discovery, and connect to a global community interested in the same. In meeting this call, we also warmly welcome new staff and a fellow for this academic year: Anne Brown (HLS ’18) joins us as the new Faculty and Program Assistant; Meera Seth is our new Publications Coordinator, joining us from Oxford University Press; and, Sohaib Baig, having recently received his doctorate from UCLA, is the 2020-2021 Research Fellow. We look forward to year that allows even greater engagement with students, faculty and staff, scholars and fellows, and the wider community. Onward, with best wishes for a healthy, safe, and thoughtful year of growth!

CONTENT: 2020 Speaker Series The Fall Speaker Series is now virtual! We launch on Tuesday, September 15, 12:00-1:00pm US EST via Zoom with Professor Nurfadzilah Yahaya  of the National University of Singapore, Dept of History) speaking on her new book, Fluid Jurisdictions: Colonial Law and Arabs in Southeast Asia (Cornell 2020). Dr. Iza Hussain of the University of Cambridge will serve as discussant. 
 
 
 
 

CONTEXT: NEW Podcasts & Videos We’re bringing the conversations at Harvard to you. Although we did not know that the pandemic would call for sheltering in place, we had the foresight to interview scholars of Islamic law who visited Harvard over the past two years for their thoughts on the latest scholarship in the field, global developments, and ongoing debates. And now you can access the podcasts that resulted from those conversations throughout the Fall. The first podcasts including Maya Shatzmiller on equity and equality looking at the economics behind women’s property rights in Islamic law and Omar Farahat on the foundational of norms that traverse Islamic law and theology.

 

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