Academic Bio
Allison Kanner-Botan is a PhD candidate in the Divinity School and the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago. Her dissertation, Maddening Love: Islamic Thought and the Politics of Desire in the Legend of Layla and Majnun, analyzes the construction of gender, rationality, and embodiment in premodern Arabic and Persian renditions of the most famous love-story of the Islamic world, the story of Layla and the madman-poet Majnun. A scholar of the literatures of Islamic societies (Persian, Arabic, Turkish, and Kurdish), her work focuses broadly on the relationship between aesthetics and social critique.