Kristen Stilt is Professor of Law at Northwestern University School of Law and an affiliated faculty member in the History Department. Her research interests are the historical development and practice of Islamic law as well as contemporary manifestations and applications of law that is presented as Islamic.
She is the author of Islamic Law in Action: Authority, Discretion, and Everyday Experiences in Mamluk Egypt (Oxford University Press, 2011) and the co-editor of the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of Islamic Law. Prior to joining Northwestern University in 2007, she was an Assistant Professor at the University of Washington, in the Law School and the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations. One of her current projects, for which she was named a Carnegie Scholar, studies the constitutional establishment of Islam as the state religion in Morocco, Egypt, and Malaysia.
She received her law degree from The University of Texas School of Law, where she was an associate editor of the Texas Law Review and Co-Editor-in-Chief of the Texas Journal of Women and the Law. Her Ph.D. (2004) in History and Middle Eastern Studies is from Harvard University. After law school, she worked for three years as an associate at Cleary, Gottlieb, Steen & Hamilton in the Washington D.C. and Moscow, Russia offices, and also worked at the UNHCR in Moscow.
