S.J. Pearce is an associate professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at New York University, where her teaching and research focus on the intellectual history and literature of Jews, Christians and Muslims in medieval Spain. Her first book, The Andalusi Literary and Intellectual Tradition: The Role of Arabic in Judah ibn Tibbon’s Ethical Will, examines the ways in which Jewish intellectuals in thirteenth century Spain and France understood Arabic to be a language of cultural prestige; the monograph was awarded the 2019 La Corónica International Book Award. She is currently writing two book-length projects: a monograph tentatively entitled In the Taifa Kingdoms: The Medieval Poetics of Modern Nationalism, which explores the re-use of the figure of the Andalusi poet-statesman in 19th- and 20th-century nationalist discourses; and a biography of Moses Maimonides for general readers, slated to be published in Reaktion Books’ new Medieval Lives series. She earned her PhD at Cornell University (Near Eastern Studies, 2011) and her BA at Yale. During the 2018-19 academic year, she was a fellow at the Frankel Institute for Judaic Studies at the University of Michigan. Previously, she has held the Louis and Hortense Apfelbaum Fellowship at the Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania and the Paulette Goddard Junior Faculty Fellowship at NYU. She is also a founding member of el taller @ kjcc, a working group for New York-area scholars of Iberian cultural studies.