Welcome to our 2022-2023 PIL-LC Fellow, Dr. Dilyara Agisheva!

In collaboration with the John W. Kluge Center at the The Library of Congress, we are pleased to announce the inaugural PIL-LC Research Fellow for the 2022-2023 academic year, Dr. Dilyara Agisheva. Agisheva received an undergraduate degree in Middle Eastern Studies and Political Science from UCLA and an MA in Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies from Columbia University. As a PhD student at Georgetown University, she specialized in Islamic legal studies and Ottoman history. In August 2021, she defended her doctoral thesis entitled “Entangled Legal Formations: Crimea Under Russian Rule in the Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries.”

This new joint fellowship is designed to provide an intellectual home to promising young scholars in Islamic legal studies, to advance their research, and to contribute to the intellectual life of the Program and greater Harvard community, the Library of Congress community, and the broader scholarly community. As a fellow, Agisheva’s research objective is to prepare a book for publication and to implement OCR software to digitize Islamic court records utilized in her monograph. The book project builds on her dissertation thesis, which explores the transformation of Islamic Crimean legal structures after the Russian Empire annexed the Crimean Peninsula in 1783. The fellowship will allow Agisheva to incorporate additional sources held at the Library of Congress and HarvardLibraries and to benefit from mentorship and collaboration with scholars at the Program in Islamic Law at the Harvard Law School.

Leave a Reply