Prof. Dr. Gianluca Parolin

• Law and popular culture, especially in Egypt

• Islamic law and its appropriation in modern legal systems

• Legal discourse, semiotics, and genre in Arabic texts

• Citizenship, constitutionalism, and legal reform in the Arab world

• Comparative legal history and colonial governance in SWANA

Scripting Justice: Crime and Retribution in Egyptian Television Drama in the 2020s

Building on the earlier Scripting Citizenship, this project examines how justice—both divine and mundane—is represented in Egyptian television drama in the 2020s, with a particular focus on crime series. It explores how narrative forms and characterisation construct evolving understandings of justice, responsibility, and moral order in the context of contemporary social and political change.

Conflicting Semiotics of Law and Governance in Early Nineteenth-Century Egypt

This project examines the emergence of modern legal language in Egypt (c. 1820s–1840s), focusing on how translation practices, early state publications, and constitutional writings reshaped the semiotics of law and governance. It explores the resulting reconfiguration of the relationship between state authority and the vocabulary of fiqh.

Adjudicating Sharia and Law: The Case Law of Egypt’s Supreme Constitutional Court

This project examines the jurisprudence of Egypt’s Supreme Constitutional Court in cases where legislation has been declared unconstitutional for breaching principles of Islamic law (art. 2). Building on an ongoing series of translations and annotations, it analyses how the Court articulates, interprets, and operationalises sharia within a modern constitutional framework, shedding light on the evolving relationship between Islamic legal principles and state law.

Parolin, G. (2026), Scripting Citizenship: Crime and Investigation in Egyptian Television Drama in the 2010s, The American University in Cairo Press.

Parolin, G. (2009), Citizenship in the Arab World, Amsterdam University Press.

Parolin, G. (2025), “Don’t Try This at Home: Interwar Parodies of Crime Fiction in the Eastern Mediterranean”, Belphégor, 23 (2: Crime Fiction and Democracy).

Parolin, G. (2024), “Becoming (False) Friends: Linguistic Practices and Source Access in Malta”, Journal of International and Comparative Law, 11(2), 213–234.

Parolin, G. (2024), “An Appalled Ghost Guiding Readers Across Semiotic Fault Lines: The Contribution of Literature to the Appreciation of Legal Change”, Asiatische Studien / Études Asiatiques, 78(3): 535–554.

Parolin, G. (2024), “A Second Violation of the Sharia Provision. The Supreme Constitutional Court of Egypt's Ruling of 12 May 2013”, Arab Law Quarterly, 1–23.

Parolin, G. (2023), “Social Media Activism in Egyptian Television Drama: Encoding the Counter-Revolution Narrative", in Middle Eastern Television Drama: Politics, Aesthetics, Practices, Routledge, 67–87.

Parolin, G. (2022), “The Great Divide in Legal Discourse: Towards a Global Historical Ontology of the Concept of Positive Law" (with Baudouin Dupret), in State Law and Legal Positivism, BRILL, 5–32.

Parolin, G. (2021), “‘Modern’ Law and Its Subjects in Tawfîq al-Ḥakîm's Diary of a Country Prosecutor (1937)”, Journal of Arabic and Islamic Studies, 21: 55–77.

Parolin, G. (2020), “Why Only Religious (In)Equality? A Gramscian Reading of Traditional Intellectuals and the ‘Citizenship’ Debate in Egypt”, Electronic Journal of Islamic and Middle Eastern Law, 1–17.

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