About Alyssa Gabbay

Alyssa Gabbay is a writer and scholar of Iranian and Polish descent whose work spans literature, religious studies, history, and gender studies. She received her B.A. from Barnard College, Columbia University and her Ph.D. from the University of Chicago, where she studied classical Persian literature and medieval Islamic history. Gabbay’s research interests include women and gender in Islam, Shi‘ism, Sufism in the medieval Persianate world, and the Babi and Baha’i faiths. She is the author of Islamic Tolerance: Amir Khusraw and Pluralism (Abingdon: Routledge, 2010), Gender and Succession in Medieval and Early Modern Islam: Bilateral Descent and the Legacy of Fatima (London: I.B. Tauris/Bloomsbury, 2020), and Exquisite Things and Strange Wonders (Harvard University Press, 2026), in addition to many articles and book chapters. Gabbay taught for 12 years at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro before retiring as Associate Professor Emerita in 2024. She is the recipient of a Fulbright-Hays fellowship, a UNCG College Teaching Excellence Award, and the Foundation for Iranian Studies’ Best Ph.D. Dissertation on a Topic of Iranian Studies award, among other honors. Gabbay 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.