Professor Reynolds received his Ph.D. from the Department of Folklore and Folklife from the University of Pennsylvania in 1991. His areas of academic interest are Arabic language and literature, autobiographies, performance studies, oral and musical traditions of the Middle East and ethnographic fieldwork. His publications include Heroic Poets, Poetic Heroes: The Ethnography of Performance in an Arabic Oral Epic Tradition (Cornell UP, 1995), Interpreting the Self: Autobiography in the Arabic Literary Tradition (UC Press, 2001), and Arab Folklore: A Handbook (Greenwood Press, 2007).