Overview
Dr. Rabhi specializes in the literatures, histories, and cultures of the Middle East and North Africa. Her comparative research and teaching in Francophone and Arabophone literature and cinema extend to West and Central Africa and the Caribbean. Her expertise in Holocaust studies, Jewish memory, and Palestinian studies informs a central concern across this work: how cultural expression preserves experiences that official histories leave unaccounted for.
Initially trained in biology and experimental sciences, she brings expertise in trauma studies, the medical humanities, and psychoanalysis to questions of embodiment, advocating close collaboration between the sciences and the humanities. She earned her PhD in Romance Studies at Cornell, with the dissertation Terra-Corpus: Memory, Matter, and the Counter-Archive and minors in Near Eastern Studies, History of Architecture, and Feminist and Gender Studies.
Her interests in painting, poetry, and opera reflect an attention to how artistic form shapes understanding: how images direct attention, language gives shape to loss, and performance makes the past present. Drawing on postcolonial thought, feminist and gender theories, and the environmental humanities, she interprets these expressive choices within the cultural and political circumstances that give them significance.
At the Humanities Scholars Program, Dr. Rabhi helps students develop purposeful connections among historical research, textual analysis, and artistic study and practice. Her mentorship pairs intellectual ambition with methodological care, guiding students toward focused questions, thoughtful use of evidence, and persuasive writing. Students in her classes are welcome to write in English, French, Arabic, and Italian and to incorporate resources in any of these languages. She regards multilingual scholarship as a way to encounter different archives, question familiar assumptions, and engage intellectual traditions on their own terms.