Athina Pfeiffer is a PhD student in Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University. She works on law and justice in the medieval Islamicate world from a social historical viewpoint. Her research focuses on the relationship between the state and the law, everyday administration of justice, and the way people related to institutions of justice and the law in Fatimid North Africa, including Egypt (tenth to twelfth centuries). She works on documents in addition to both published and unpublished long-form texts.

Athina is proficient in Arabic, Persian, and Judeo-Arabic.

She holds a BA in History and an MA in Islamic Studies from Sorbonne University, Paris, and also earned a BA in Law from Panthéon-Assas University, Paris. Before joining the department, Athina successfully passed the agrégation d’histoire and taught History and Geography in French high schools for two years.

Publications: 

“La réorganisation du système judiciaire fatimide sous al-Muʿizz,” Arabica 70 (2023), 1-68.

“Documents of Sale as Living Objects,” Harvard Islamic Law Blog (2023).