Academic Bio
Isabel Lachenauer is a PhD candidate in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago, where she specializes in the literature and cultural history of late medieval Anatolia. Her research, including her dissertation “Artūḫı Wept: Reading Emotions in ʿĀrif ʿAlī’s Dānişmendnāme,” encompasses the study of emotions and gender in Old Anatolian Turkish popular literature and romance.
Isabel was an American Research Institute in Turkey Summer Fellow for Advanced Turkish language study at Boğaziçi University in 2016 and a Foreign Language and Area Studies scholar for Turkish (2017) and Persian (AY 2017-18). She received her MA (Hons) Arabic and Middle Eastern Studies from the University of St Andrews in 2013 and MSc Advanced Arabic from the University of Edinburgh in 2014.
Under the pen name Isabel Cañas, she is the author of the novel The Hacienda, forthcoming from Berkley Publishing (Penguin Random House) May 10, 2022.