Kumail Rajani is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Islamic Studies at the Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies, University of Exeter, working on the Law, Authority and Learning in Shiite Islam Project. He completed his PhD at Exeter with a dissertation entitled Making Sense of Ismaili Traditions: The Modes and Meanings of the Transmission of Ḥadīth in the Works of al-Qāḍī al-Nuʿmān (d. 363/974). His entry on ‘Hadith: Shiʿi’ is published in the online Oxford Bibliography of Islamic Studies. He is the founder of Shii Dates project: a database of the death records of Shiʿi scholars spanning fourteen centuries arranged in a chronological order. He has two chapters on Shiʿi hadith criticism and rijal which he co-authored for the forthcoming The Oxford Handbook of Hadith Studies. Though primarily focused on the origins and development of Shiʿi hadith, his research includes Qurʾanic exegesis, fiqh, uṣūl, Ismaili Studies, and Shiʿi Studies more broadly. Kumail has spent a number of years in the Shiʿi seminary (Ḥawza) of Qum studying and teaching classical Islamic texts of ḥadīth, fiqh and Islamic legal theory