Rozaliya Garipova

Rozaliya Garipova joined the Department of History, Philosophy and Religious Studies in August 2017 as Assistant Professor of Islamic Studies and History. She received her Ph.D. in Near Eastern Studies from Princeton University. Her research and teaching focus on the Islamic history of Russia, Central Eurasia, and the larger Muslim world.

She is particularly interested in exploring issues of religious authority (both male and female), Islamic law, women and gender in Islam, as well as the interaction between Islamic law and empire. Rozaliya’s current book project, titled Islamic Family Law in Imperial Russia: Empire, Legality and Religious Authority, is a religious history of Muslim family life in the Volga-Urals and Western Siberia. It traces the impact of imperial governance on the legality of Muslim marriage and divorce and the legal authority of the ulama, examining how Muslims responded to new challenges under late imperial rule.

Research related to this book project has been published in several articles, the most recent being “Between Imperial Law and Islamic Law: Muslim Subjects and the Legality of Remarriage in Nineteenth-Century Russia,” in Sharia in the Russian Empire: The Reach and Limits of Islamic Law in Central Eurasia, 1550–1917 (Edinburgh University Press, 2020).

Rozaliya’s other research interests include female religious authority among Volga-Ural Muslims during the late Russian imperial and Soviet periods. On this topic, her recent publications include “Muslim Female Religious Authority in Russia: How Mukhlisa Bubi Became the First Female Qāḍī in the Modern Muslim World” and “From Kolkhoz to Pulpit: Rashida Iskhaqi and Female Religious Authority in Soviet and Post-Soviet Russia” (currently under revision).

She is also part of a collaborative project on the Sacred Geography of Kazakhstan, focusing on Tatar mosques in and around the city of Semipalatinsk in northeastern Kazakhstan.

Rozaliya has received several prestigious grants and fellowships. These include a fellowship at the Slavic and Eurasian Research Center at Hokkaido University in Japan (2019), and a grant from the British Library’s Endangered Archives Programme for the digitization of Islamic books and manuscripts in Semipalatinsk’s Wooden Mosque (2019–20).

Before joining Nazarbayev University, she held the inaugural James Billington Fellowship at the Kennan Institute, Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, D.C., a fellowship at the School of Historical Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, and an Andrew Mellon Postdoctoral Teaching Fellowship at the Department of Religious Studies, University of Pennsylvania.

Her articles have been published in The Journal of Economic and Social History of the Orient, Islamic Law and Society, and Die Welt des Islams.