Jarrah is a postdoctoral researcher at the École française d'Extrême-Orient in Paris and a research affiliate at the University of Sydney. His research focuses on the historical writing practices of premodern Southeast Asians, specialising in texts written in Malay, Javanese, and Balinese. He is also interested in the theory of history, the environmental and economic history of Southeast Asia, modern Indonesian history, and Indonesian popular music. He is an editor of the PoP blog on New Mandala.