Member of the Cluster 1 : « Sacred books » at the Laboratoire d’études sur les monothéismes (UMR 8584).
Lena Salaymeh is Professor in the Section des Sciences Religieuses of the École Pratique des Hautes Études (Paris Sciences et Lettres) and British Academy Global Professor in the Oxford School of Global and Area Studies(University of Oxford). She is also Co-Organizer of the Decolonial Comparative Law Project at the Max Planck Institute for Comparative and Private International Law.
Lena Salaymeh is a scholar of law and history, with specializations in Islamic jurisprudence, Jewish jurisprudence, and critical theory. Her scholarship on law and religion brings together legal history and critiques of secularism. She was recently awarded a Guggenheim and her first book received the American Academy of Religion Award for Excellence in the Study of Religion in the category of Textual Studies. She has held visiting positions at the École Pratique des Hautes Études (Sciences Religieuses), Princeton University (Davis Center, Department of History), and the Max Planck Institute for Comparative and Private International Law (Hamburg). She received her JD from Harvard and her PhD in Legal and Islamic History from UC Berkeley

Research topics

 Islamic law and history.
 Jewish law and history.
 Legal history.
 Critical and decolonial theory ;

Thèmes de recherche

 Critical jurisprudence and critical historiography in Islamic and Jewish studies.
 Critical legal studies.
 Comparative law and legal history.
 Critical and decolonial theory.

Projets en cours

 Organisation of the project Decolonial Comparative Law, Max Planck Institute for Comparative and International Private Law (Hamburg).
“Decolonial comparative law : a conceptual introduction” (article)
 Divine law in the Islamic tradition (book)
 Thinking critically about Islam and Islamic law (book)
 Revolutionary Islamic law (book)

Séminaires de recherche

 Conférence master : « Les peuples du livre »,
Mercredi de 12:00 à 13:00h (Paris)
 Conférence principale : « Le droit divin et les lois divines II »,
Mercredi de 16:00 à 18:00h (Paris)

Prix et distinctions honorifiques

 Guggenheim Fellow
 Award for Excellence in the Study of Religion for Textual Studies of the American Academy of Religion.

Selected book

The Beginnings of Islamic Law : Late Antique Islamicate Legal Traditions, Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 2016.