Interviews - Mitra Sharafi
Mitra Sharafi is a legal historian of South Asia and an Assistant Professor of Law at the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Law. She holds law degrees from Cambridge and Oxford and a doctorate in history from Princeton. Her book, Law and Identity in Colonial South Asia: Parsi Legal Culture, 1772-1947 is forthcoming in 2014 with Cambridge University Press "Studies in Legal History" series. It explores the legal culture of the Parsis or Zoroastrians of British India, an ethno-religious minority that was unusually invested in colonial law. Currently, Sharafi is at work on a project on medical jurisprudence in colonial India (including bloodstain analysis and poisoning). She is also writing a study of non-Europeans from across the British Empire who studied law at London's Inns of Court during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Since 2010, her South Asian Legal History Resources website has shared research guides and other tools for the historical study of law in South Asia.
Sharafi's research interests include South Asian legal history; the history of the legal profession; the history of colonialism; law and religion; law and minorities; legal consciousness; legal pluralism; and the history of science and medicine.