Raha Rafii is currently an Honorary Fellow at the Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies at the University of Exeter, where she was previously a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow on the Law and Learning in Imami Shi‘i Islam ERC project. She received her PhD in 2019 from the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at the University of Pennsylvania and specializes in medieval Islamic history, jurisprudence, and Arabic and Persian historiography. As an American Society of Legal History Wallace Johnson First Book Fellow, she is working on turning her dissertation into a book titled Imagining the Islamic Judge: The Adab al-qadi Genre. Focusing on the standard legal genre of adab al-qāḍī, or judicial protocol, the book project focuses on the impacts and intersections of non-legal literatures on adab al-qāḍī works. In addition to her research specialization, she also publishes on digital humanities, museums, and orientalism in both academic and public-facing outlets.
She received her B.S. in International Politics from Georgetown University and masters’ degrees in both Oriental Studies and Jewish Studies from the University of Oxford. She has also held a Fulbright scholarship in Egypt as well as a Legal Theory Fellowship at Cardozo Law School.