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Biography:
Mitra Sharafi joined the Institute for Legal Studies and UW Law School in Fall 2007. She holds two law degrees and a doctorate in history. Her PhD dissertation is a study of law and identity in the Parsi or Indian Zoroastrian community of colonial India and Burma, and was awarded the 2007 South Asia Council's Dissertation Prize.
Having grown up in Canada with an Iranian father and American mother, Sharafi's personal interest in comparative cultures led her to India, where the personal law system combines the common law with the religious legal traditions of Hindu, Muslim, and other communities. Sharafi first travelled to India during law school on the fiftieth anniversary of Indian independence in 1997. She has returned many times since, particularly for archival research at the Bombay High Court in Mumbai. In 2006-7, she spent six months in India, during which time her work also took her to Pakistan and Myanmar (formerly Burma).
Sharafi's research interests include the legal history of marriage, divorce, and trusts in colonial South Asia; Parsi and Zoroastrian studies; legal pluralism; and the history of the legal profession in the British Empire. She is an organizer of the Law and Society Association's International Research Collaborative on South Asian Colonial Legal History. Sharafi joins UW following a two-year research fellowship at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge University and a brief visiting fellowship at Griffith University's Socio-Legal Research Center in Australia.
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