Ayah Aboelela is a Ph.D. student in World History at Northeastern University. She earned her M.A. in World History and Graduate Certificate in Digital Humanities from Northeastern in 2023, and her B.S. in Computer Science and minor in Arabic Studies from UMass Boston in 2021, summa cum laude. Her research focuses on the history of the nineteenth-century Hajj and its relationship with European colonialism and the Ottoman Empire through social, religious, and environmental dimensions. Her writing has been published by Traversing Tradition, The Qarawiyyin Project, and MuslimMatters among others. She is also a student of traditional Islamic scholarship, currently holding an ijazah in two Quranic recitations and working on learning more. Ayah hopes to combine her background in software and love for history and storytelling to make historical stories more accessible to both academic and non-academic audiences.
