Legal History between the Humanities and Social Sciences

Julia Stephens is an assistant professor of history at Rutgers University, New Brunswick. Her research focuses on how law has shaped religion, family, and economy in colonial and postcolonial South Asia and in the wider Indian diaspora. Her first book, Governing Islam: Law, Empire, and Secularism in South Asia, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2018. She is currently working on a new project tentatively titled “Worldly Afterlives: Death and Diaspora in the Indian Ocean,” which traces the lives of Indian migrants through the material and immaterial legacies that they left behind.