Biography

Kristen A. Stilt is a Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. She also serves as Director of the Islamic Legal Studies Program: Law and Social Change and Faculty Director of the Animal Law & Policy Program. Her research focuses on Islamic law and society in both historical and contemporary contexts.

Prior to her position at HLS Stilt was the Harry R. Horrow Professor in International Law at Northwestern Law School and a Professor of History at Northwestern University. Stilt was named a Carnegie Scholar for her work on Constitutional Islam, and in 2013 she was awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship.  She has also received awards from Fulbright and Fulbright-Hays.

Stilt received a JD 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 in the Law. Stilt holds a PhD in History and Middle Eastern Studies from Harvard University. 

Her publications include Islamic Law in Action (Oxford University Press, 2011) and “Contextualizing Constitutional Islam: The Malaysian Experience,” which was published in the International Journal of Constitutional Law in 2015 and won the award for the best article published in that journal that year.