Ibtissam Bouachrine

Ibtissam Bouachrine is a professor at Smith College and a Faculty Associate with the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University. Trained as a medievalist, her transdisciplinary scholarship and teaching focus on the cultures and societies of Iberia, Africa, and the Middle East. She is the author of two books: Women and Islam (2014) and Anthem of Misogyny (2022). She also writes extensively for popular media outlets. Her public writing appeared in Ms. Magazine, U.S. News, Visible Magazine, and other publications.

Bouachrine’s research has been supported by grants and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Institute, the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies at Harvard University, and the Association for the Study of the Middle East and Africa. She was previously a visiting scholar at the Center for European and Mediterranean Studies at New York University. In 2022–23, she was a visiting scholar at the Institute for Rebooting Social Media at Harvard University, where she began working on her current book project tentatively titled “The Digital Lives of Muslim Women.” In 2023, she was awarded a prestigious residency from the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center in Italy.

The courses she taught recently include “Islam in the West,” “Race and the Foundations of Europe,” “Sex and the Medieval City,” “Spanish Colonialism in Africa,” “Jewish Women of the Muslim Mediterranean,” “Difference,” “Women in Iberian Cinema,” “Introduction to Middle East Studies,” and “Minorities in North Africa and the Middle East."

Bouachrine has held several administrative positions at Smith. She chaired Middle East studies, women’s education concentration, medieval studies, and the Department of Spanish and Portuguese. She also directed the Smith in Paris and Five College Arabic programs. She serves on various editorial boards, including the Journal of the Middle East and Africa and Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism. She is the current president of the Phi Beta Kappa chapter at Smith.

Bouachrine is fluent in Arabic, French, and Spanish. She has studied Hebrew, Italian, and Portuguese. You can follow her on X @ibouachr