Tahera Qutbuddin

Tahera Qutbuddin (Harvard University, PhD 1999) is Associate Professor of Arabic Literature at the University of Chicago. She has also taught at Yale University and the University of Utah. After school in India, she studied Arabic language and literature in Cairo (Ain Shams University, BA 1988 and Tamhidi Magister 1990). Her scholarship focuses on intersections of the literary, the religious, and the political in classical Arabic poetry and prose. She is the author of Al-Muʾayyad al-Shirazi and Fatimid Daʿwa Poetry: A Case of Commitment in Classical Arabic Literature (Leiden: Brill, 2005). She is also the editor and translator of A Treasury of Virtues: Sayings, Sermons, and Teachings of Ali compiled by al-Qadi al-Qudaʿi, with the One Hundred Proverbs attributed to al-Jahiz (NYU Press, 2013). Her current book project is Classical Arabic Oratory: The Rhetoric and Politics of Public Address in the Islamic World, for which she was awarded a fellowship by the Carnegie Corporation of New York. She has published articles on the Qurʾan, Muhammad, the sermons of ʿAli ibn Abi Talib, Fatimid and Tayyibi literature, Arabic in India, and Islamic preaching. Her courses include Islamic thought and literature, pre-Islamic poetry, Abbasid poetry, al-Mutanabbi, Shia poetry, Arabic syntax, the Maqamat of Badiʿ al-Zaman al-Hamadhani, the khutbah and the Nahj al-balaghah.