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Renee Spellman is a Ph.D. candidate in the critical studies track of the School of Middle Eastern and North African Studies at the University of Arizona. She will graduate in Summer 2024.  She completed her B.A. in psychology at Gordon College in Massachusetts and her M.A. in Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem Rothberg International School.

Renee’s research interests include gender studies, feminism, global south feminism, Middle Eastern feminisms, colonialism, and de-colonialism. Her current dissertation research examines feminism in a global south context specifically inquiring about what feminism means and looks like to Palestinian women living under occupation in East Jerusalem and the West Bank. She focuses on Palestinian women’s lived experiences in being women and in promoting greater gender equality and women’s rights under complex and oppressive socio-political and economic conditions. Her research aims to highlight marginalized and underrepresented voices of global south women who engage in feminism to achieve great gender equality and to resist the occupation of their land, culture, traditions, and dignity of their personhood. She believes that highlighting indigenous women’s voices leads to a nuanced understanding of a region, conflict, and gender issues and creates alternative non-Western knowledge sources.

Born and raised in Maine, she lived in the Middle East for ten years between 2007-2017 and again in 2022 where she worked, studied, and taught English and Arabic. After completing her M.A. at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, she went on to teach English and Arabic as second languages in Jerusalem and the West Bank. She speaks fluent colloquial Arabic and has an intermediate level of Hebrew. She taught Arabic language and culture to foreign exchange students at Al-Quds Bard University in the West Bank between 2013-2016.

At the University of Arizona, she was a four-year Foreign Language and Area Studies (FLAS) fellow for Arabic and Hebrew language between 2017-2021. During her time at the University of Arizona, she taught Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) and colloquial Palestinian Arabic and was the assistant to the director of educational outreach at the University of Arizona Center for Middle Eastern Studies. In the summer of 2019, she was the project coordinator for CMES’s National Endowment for the Humanities Institute entitled, Understanding Middle Eastern Millennials through Literature, Culture, and Media. In 2021, she was granted a Fulbright Student award for teaching English to Palestinian high school students in East Jerusalem and the West Bank. She also conducted part of her dissertation fieldwork there between 2021-2022. In 2023, she was granted a Fulbright-Hays Dissertation Research Abroad Fellowship (FHDRA) to continue and finish her fieldwork and dissertation in East Jerusalem and the West Bank.

In the MassArt Humanities Department, Renee teaches Literary Traditions.