Jessica Marglin

Jessica Marglin is professor of Religion, History, and Law, and the Ruth Ziegler Chair in Jewish Studies at the University of Southern California. She will be the 2023–2024 Dornsife-EHESS professeure invitée at the EHESS, where she will be in residence during the spring semester of 2024. During her residency she will present on her new project, a history of extraterritoriality in the nineteenth century Mediterranean. Extraterritoriality was a legal status akin to diplomatic immunity today, except that it not only extended to diplomats, but also to ordinary foreigners living, trading, and traveling in the Middle East and North Africa. The book offers a new approach to both sovereignty and law in the modern period, both of which have generally been told as a European story—a dimension of domestic and international law whose origins are located in the West. The view from the Middle East and North Africa suggests that the evolution of both territorial sovereignty and modern citizenship were closely bound up with the rise of extraterritoriality. The prerogatives of the various states claiming jurisdiction demanded a constant negotiation of belonging and sovereignty on both sides of the Mediterranean—Western states’ jurisdiction over subjects abroad, and Muslim rulers’ authority over those residing in their territory.

Marglin earned her PhD from Princeton University and her BA and MA (in Middle Eastern Studies) from Harvard University. Her research focuses on the history of Jews and Muslims in North Africa and the Mediterranean, with particular attention to law. Her first book, Across Legal Lines: Jews and Muslims in Modern Morocco (Yale University Press 2016), was awarded the Salo Wittmayer Baron Book Prize, a National Jewish Book Award, and the Norris and Carol Hundley Award. Drawing on sources in Arabic, Hebrew, and a number of European languages, Across Legal Lines traces the movement of Jews among the various legal institutions that together made up Morocco’s plural legal system. The book demonstrates that law could act as a force for Jews’ integration into the broader Islamic society in which they lived. Marglin’s second book, The Shamama Case; Contesting Citizenship across the Modern Mediterranean (Princeton University Press, 2022) was awarded the Albert Hourani book award by the Middle Eastern Studies Association and the Hurst Award for socio-legal history by the Law and Society Association.

Marglin has received numerous awards and fellowships, including the Rome Prize, a National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship, and a Fulbright fellowship; she has been a resident fellow at the Institut d’Etudes Avancées in Paris and the Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. Her publications have appeared in Annales : Histoire, Sciences Sociales, the International Journal of Middle East Studies, Comparative Studies in Society and History, Jewish Social Studies, the Jewish Quarterly Review, and the British Journal of Middle East Studies. At USC, she has served as co-director of the Center for Law, History and Culture; she also founded and directs the Graduate Certificate in Jewish Studies.

Photo of Professor Marglin by Scarlett Freund.

Header image: “Le Plus Grand Reseau du Monde,” Lucien Boucher,
Air France, 1964, David Rumsey Map Center