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Jessica Rahardjo is a Postdoctoral Researcher on the Leverhulme Trust-funded project Mapping Sumatra’s Manuscript Cultures. Her research focuses on the material and manuscript cultures of Islamic Southeast Asia.

In 2024, she completed her DPhil in History at the University of Oxford with a dissertation on batu Aceh, a Southeast Asian Islamic tombstone tradition spanning the 15th to 19th centuries. She began her training as an art historian during her undergraduate studies at SOAS University of London and University College London, before pursuing an MPhil in Islamic Art and Archaeology at the University of Oxford. 

Jessica was a recipient of the Indian Ocean Exchanges fellowship (2021–23), supported by the Getty Foundation’s Connecting Art Histories initiative. She has also contributed to several cultural heritage projects, including working as a cataloguer for the Maldives Heritage Survey.

Alongside her research, she is actively involved in teaching and consulting. She is a committee member of Teaching the Codex, an initiative dedicated to developing pedagogical approaches to palaeography and codicology. She has co-taught a course on Jawi manuscripts and has led reading groups on Arabic epigraphy and Jawi over the years.

Jessica’s research interests include the Islamic material culture of Southeast Asia and the Indian Ocean world, Arabic and Jawi manuscript traditions, the intersection of legal and material cultures, and the history of Islam in the early modern period.