Tahera Qutbuddin (Harvard University, Ph.D. 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, B.A. 1988, Tamhīdī 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-Shīrāzī and Fatimid Daʿwa Poetry: A Case of Commitment in Classical Arabic Literature (Leiden: Brill, 2005). 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 also published articles on the Qurʾan, Muḥammad, the sermons of ʿAlī ibn Abī Ṭālib, Fatimid and Ṭayyibī literature, Arabic in India, and Islamic preaching.