Lena Salaymeh

Salaymeh studied at the University of California, Berkeley, where she obtained a BA in Comparative Literature and Near Eastern Studies and an MA and PhD in History, Legal & Middle Eastern.^[2] She also obtained a JD from Harvard Law School.^[2] Her doctoral dissertation Late antique and medieval Islamic legal histories: contextual changes and comparative (re)considerations was supervised by Ira M. Lapidus.^[1]

Salaymeh worked at the Tel Aviv University Faculty of Law as an Associate Professor of Law.^[2] She worked at the Max Planck Institute for Comparative and International Private Law as a senior research fellow and founded their Decolonial Law Project,^[3] serving as that program's director from 2019 to 2023.^[4] She has also served as director of studies at the École pratique des hautes études's religious studies department.^[4] She has also held several visiting positions,^[4] including as a 2018-2019 Visiting Associate Research Scholar at Princeton University's Shelby Cullom Davis Center and as a 2020 British Academy-University of Oxford Global Professor.^[3][5]

Salaymeh specializes in law and religion.^[4] In 2016, her first^[4] book, The Beginnings of Islamic Law: Late Antique Islamicate Legal Traditions, was published by Cambridge University Press,^[6] with severed of its parts inspired by her doctoral dissertation.^[7] She won the 2017 American Academy of Religion Book Award in Textual Studies for her book.^[6] In 2019, she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in Law.^[8] She also lectured at the Brown University Center for Middle East Studies in February 2023.^[9] She has written op-eds for Informed Comment and Opinio Juris.^[10][11]

• The Beginnings of Islamic Law: Late Antique Islamicate Legal Traditions (2017)^[a]