Mead fellow Quin McGlame recently spoke with Professor Antrim, Professor of History and International Studies, who has been a member of the Trinity community since 2006. She teaches courses in three departments at the College: History, International Studies, and Women, Gender, and Sexuality. All her courses relate in some way to the Middle East, an area she began to love while studying Arabic as an undergraduate student. During her career, she has had the ability to study Arabic texts in the original and visited the Middle East and Northwest Africa to conduct research.
Additionally, Professor Antrim was selected last spring for a prestigious fellowship at the Institute for Advance Study in Princeton, New Jersey for the spring 2024 semester. At the IAS, Professor Antrim will work on her third book, exploring eroticism in medieval Arabic story collections. Her book will draw from Arabic manuscripts produced before 1700, including many stories from the collection The 1001 Nights, and will analyze the relationship between gender, power, and notions of the body. While at the IAS, Professor Antrim will have the opportunity to work with a community of scholars across multiple disciplines, while living on the campus as a residential fellow. Finally, she will have access to Princeton’s Firestone Library, one of the best research libraries in the United States for her field.
Professor Antrim believes that studying the Middle East and its rich history helps “humanize its people, especially Muslims, Arabs, and Palestinians who are too often vilified or erased in US media and political discourse.” Through her research and teaching, Professor Antrim hopes to dispel misconceptions about the Middle East and to share lesser-known aspects of its history.
