Meet Alyssa Gabbay

Born in the United States, Alyssa Gabbay grew up surrounded by emblems of her Iranian heritage, but without a strong sense of Iranian identity. That changed when, as an adult, she took a Persian language course and immediately fell in love – an event that propelled her into a Ph.D. program in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago. After studying classical Persian literature with Professor Heshmat Moayyad, medieval Islamic history with Professor John Woods, and Islamic civilization with Professor Wadad Kadi, she graduated with honors in 2007. She served as Visiting Scholar and Lecturer at the University of Washington’s Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilization before joining the Department of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, where she is now Associate Professor and Director of Undergraduate Studies. At UNCG, she teaches classes about Islam, the Qur’an, Islamic mysticism, and religions of Iran, among other subjects. She is also the co-founder and co-director of the Islamic Studies Research Network.

Gabbay’s research interests include women and gender in Islam, Shi‘ism, Indo-Persian culture, and religious pluralism. She is the author of two books, Islamic Tolerance: Amir Khusraw and Pluralism (Abingdon: Routledge, 2010) and Gender and Succession in Medieval and Early Modern Islam: Bilateral Descent and the Legacy of Fatima (London: I.B. Tauris/Bloomsbury, 2020), as well as many articles, book chapters, and encyclopedia entries. She is currently working on a critical edition and translation of the Indo-Persian poet Amir Khusraw’s prefaces (under advance contract with Murty Classical Library of India, Harvard University Press). Gabbay is the recipient of the Candace Bernard and Robert Glickman Dean’s Professorship in the College of Arts and Sciences of UNCG and the Foundation for Iranian Studies’ Best Ph.D. Dissertation on a Topic of Iranian Studies award, among other honors. She has traveled widely in the Middle East and South Asia, including to Egypt, Iran, Turkey, Kuwait, and India, where she lived for nine months while researching her dissertation.