Arifur Rahman

Arifur Rahman is currently pursuing his DPhil in Law as a Dean’s Scholar. His doctoral project explores the intersection of transnational corporations, international law, and LGBT+ rights from a normative point of view, under the supervision of Nicholas Bamforth. The project is fully funded by the Faculty of Law and The Queen’s College. He is also a member of the editorial team of the Oxford University Commonwealth Law Journal.

Arifur holds an LLB and an LLM in International Law from the University of Dhaka. He studied a summer course on gender equality at the University of Oslo before pursuing an LLM at NYU Law as a Vanderbilt Scholar. At NYU, he wrote his LLM paper on male rape victims and the case for a gender-neutral definition of rape in Bangladesh under the supervision of Professor David A.J. Richards. Arifur represented NYU Law at the Salzburg Cutler Fellowship in International Law and worked with Pablo de Greiff, the first UN Special Rapporteur on transitional justice at the Center for Human Rights and Global Justice. He was also a graduate editor of the NYU Review of Law and Social Change. After graduation, Arifur worked at the UNDP Headquarters (New York) as a fellow, where he contributed to the first-ever Gender Justice Platform Report. Currently, as the MCR Equality Officer at The Queen’s College, Arifur launched and hosts the series “Uncomfortable Conversations”, especially on matters related to DEI.

Arifur’s research broadly focuses on law, gender, and sexuality, and he has published in leading peer-reviewed journals and forums. In late 2024, his op-ed on queering constitution-making in Bangladesh, published in The Daily Star, was censored due to social backlash.