Rkia Elaroui Cornell has been Research Associate Professor of Arabic at the University of Arkansas since fall 2000. A native of Morocco, she obtained a degree in secondary education at the Women's Regional Normal School in Meknčs, Morocco, and finished an eight-year contract with the Moroccan Ministry of Education, specializing in foreign language pedagogy. After moving to the United States, she served as an official interpreter for the Superior Court of Los Angeles County, California. From 1991-2000 she was Assistant Professor of the Practice of Arabic at Duke University. In 1999, she published Early Sufi Women, a translation of Dhikr al-niswa al-muta'abbidat al-sufiyyat by the eleventh-century Persian mystic Abu 'Abd al-Rahman al-Sulami. She has given numerous lectures and conference presentations on the subjects of Qur'anic exegesis, women in Islam, and language pedagogy. She is currently preparing a book on the woman saint Rabi'a al-'Adawiyya, an advanced reader in pre-modern Arabic literature, and an Arabic edition of al-Sulami's Quran commentary, Haqa'iq al-tafsir.