Rabiat Akande joined the University of Maryland Francis King Carey School of Law in 2024. She works in the fields of legal history, law and religion, constitutional and comparative constitutional law, Islamic law, international law, and (post)colonial African law and society.
Professor Akande is the author of Entangled Domains: Empire, Law, and Religion in Northern Nigeria (Cambridge University Press, 2023), a work that has received several honors including Special Mention, the International Society of Public Law (ICON-S) Book Prize; Honorable Mention, the Canadian Law and Society Association Wesley Pue Book Prize; and Finalist, African Studies Association Book Prize.
Her work has also appeared in the American Journal of International Law, where her January 2024 article, “An Imperial History of Race-Religion in International Law,” was the subject of a symposium issue in AJIL Unbound. She is author of “Centering the Black Muslimah: An Agenda for Intersectionalizing the Study of Islamophobia” in Anver Emon ed., Systemic Islamophobia Anthology (University of Toronto Press, 2023), a volume that was named to The Hill Times’ 100 Best Books of 2023. She has also published in the Journal of Law and Religion, Law and History Review, the Supreme Court Review, and in volumes by Cambridge University Press, University of Toronto Press, and University of Virginia Press. Currently, she is co-editing an encyclopedia of law and religion (Elgar Publishing: under contract), an African international law reader, and a volume on African international legal history. She is also at work on a book exploring Malcolm X’s intellectual legacy titled Malcolm X, Black Globalism, and the Human Rights Critique of Imperialism.
Professor Akande chairs the international legal history project at the African Institute of International Law in Arusha with the support of the African Union and the Gerda Henkel Foundation, among other institutions. She joined Maryland Carey Law from Osgoode Hall Law School where she was an assistant professor and nominated to a York Research Chair in Law and the Histories of Empire. Before Osgoode, Professor Akande was an Academy Scholar at the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies from 2019 to 2021. She has taught at Harvard Law School as a Clark Byse Fellow, and at Northeastern University School of Law.
Professor Akande received her Doctor of Juridical Science (SJD) degree from Harvard Law School in 2019 with her dissertation, “Navigating Entanglements: Contestations over Religion-State Relations in British Northern Nigeria, c. 1890-1978,” receiving the Law and Society in the Muslim World Prize. She obtained her Bachelor of Laws from the University of Ibadan, graduating with First Class Honors and at the top of her class, and from the Nigerian Law School with First Class Honors.
Professor Akande’s research has been supported by several fellowships and grants, including by the Social Science and Humanities Research Council, the Gerda Henkel Foundation, the US National Science Foundation (as part of a Law and Society Association International Research Collaborative), the Cravath International Research fellowship, the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs fellowship, and the Harvard Program on Law and Society in the Muslim World research grant, among others. She serves on the International Journal of Law in Context editorial board. She co-chairs the American Society of International Law’s Africa Interest Group and is chair of the African Studies Association Islam in Africa Study Group. She is also active in the American Society for Legal History and the Law and Society Association.