Latifeh Aavani is a Post-doctoral Fellow in the Committee on the Study of Religion. She is a scholar of law and religion, specializing in the history of Islamic law, particularly Shīʿī legal thought, and the history of constitutionalism in the modern Middle East, with a focus on Iran, Egypt, and the Ottoman Empire. Her research examines the processes of modernization in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, especially how European law influenced the development of Islamic law and contributed to the rise of the codification movement as a framework for legal reform. She also explores the intersections of modern law and secularism, with particular attention to how religion is reflected in constitutional frameworks. She is currently completing a book project on the history of the rule of law and constitutional thought in Iran, tracing developments from the Qajar period to contemporary debates.
Her second research project focuses on Shīʿī legal theory and legal semantics, examining how these intellectual traditions could contribute to legal reform, particularly in the field of family law. Prior to joining Harvard, Aavani was a post-doctoral fellow at the MacMillan Center at Yale University and a lecturer in Religious Studies at Yale.
She holds an LLB from the University of Tehran Faculty of Law, an LLM from Boston College, an LLM from Harvard Law School, and a PhD in the Study of Religion from Harvard University.