Dr. Nurfadzilah Yahaya

Biography

Nurfadzilah Yahaya traces colonial institutional frameworks built by enduring juridical, territorial, and extractive architectures that have decisively transformed societies and influenced contemporary relations between communities, resource access, and state power. Her book, Fluid Jurisdictions: Colonial Law and the Arab Diaspora in Southeast Asia (Cornell University Press, 2020), examines how Arab commercial elites maneuvered within British and Dutch legal frameworks to help define imperial sovereignty. Her research explores strategies to safeguard international family estates within colonial judicial systems, demonstrating how dissolved boundaries between private agreements and public law created jurisdictional spillover for subjects pursuing legal security, inadvertently expanding imperial control. Her current work includes tracing the legal authority materialized in physical space through land reclamation during the British Empire, exemplifying how such transformations affect geography and sovereignty. Yahaya's research interests span the history of petroleum in Indonesia and the global history of the Dutch Empire. She has published in the Journal of Women's History and Law and History Review, and has co-edited special journal issues focusing on Islam and colonialism. Before joining Yale, she taught at the National University of Singapore, where she offered courses on the histories of Southeast Asia, the Islamic world, and the British and Dutch Empires.

Research Interests

Experience