Academic Bio
Rachel Schine is a doctoral candidate in Arabic language and literature, with a focus on medieval Arabic and Judeo-Arabic works. Her research interests include orality and storytelling practices, gender/sexuality, and race/race-making in the context of popular narrative, popular exegesis, and prophetology. Her dissertation, supervised by Dr. Tahera Qutbuddin, focuses on representations of blackness and Africanness as embodied by prominent heroic figures in the siyar sha'biyya, a corpus of chivalric legends first attested in the 12th century. She has instructed in courses relating to Islamic culture in both the early and middle periods, as well as general surveys of Middle Eastern history, and has published on animal motifs and etiologies of race in popular Arabic and Persian prose.