Rachel Schine
Humanities Research Fellow
Education: PhD, University of Chicago
Research Areas: blackness, race, racialization, kinship, popular literature, adab, epic, sīra, Arabic literature, premodern, medieval, social history
About Rachel
Rachel Schine holds a PhD in Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations from the University of Chicago. She then served as a postdoctoral associate and instructor of Arabic literature and culture at the University of Colorado, Boulder in the Department of Asian Languages and Civilizations. Her current book project, Black Knights: Arabic Epic and the Making of Medieval Race, explores the origins, literary functions, and social histories of Black protagonists in Arabic popular literature, and particularly in the language’s longest epic, Sīrat al-Amīra Dhāt al-Himma. She has published on topics relating to racialization and kinship in Arabic storytelling in, among others, the Journal of Arabic Literature and al-‘Uṣūr al-Wusṭā: The Journal of Middle East Medievalists.
Publications
Books
Schine, Rachel. Black Knights: Arabic Epic and the Making of Medieval Race. University of Chicago Press, 2024.
Journals
Schine, Rachel. “Translating Race in the Islamic Studies Classroom.” Al-ʿUṣūr al-wusṭā: The Journal of Middle East Medievalists 30 (2022): 320-383.
Schine, Rachel. “Nourishing the Noble: Breastfeeding and Hero-Making in Medieval Arabic Popular Literature.” Al-‘Usur al-Wusta: The Journal of Middle East Medievalists 27, no. 1 (2019): 165–200.
Schine, Rachel. “Conceiving the Pre-Modern Black-Arab Hero: On the gendered production of racial difference in Sīrat al-Amīrah Dhāt al-Himmah.” Journal of Arabic Literature 48, no. 3 (2017): 298–326.
Book Chapters
Razzaque, Arafat A. and Rachel Schine. “Teaching the Worlds of the Thousand and One Nights.” In Approaches to Teaching the Global Middle Ages, ed. Geraldine Heng. Modern Language Association, 2022.
Encyclopedia Entries
Schine, Rachel. “Race and Blackness in Premodern Arabic Literature.” The Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature. Oxford University Press, 2021.
