Sophie Schmid received her B.A. in Islamic Studies and Anthropology from the University of Zurich and her M.A. in Arabic Studies from the Freie Universität Berlin. After working in the fields of political education and consultation in Beirut, Lebanon, and Amman, Jordan, she began working on her PhD thesis in October 2022, funded by the Friedrich Naumann Foundation for Freedom. In October 2023, she joined the Friedrich Schlegel Graduate School as well as the Cluster of Excellence Temporal Communities, where she works as a doctoral researcher in the project "Magical Realisms and Speculative Literature (Research Area 3: Future Perfect).

Current research includes an EXC 2020 doctoral research project, Of Raging Bees and Vengeful Specters: The Poetics of Violence and Trauma in Arabic Magical Realist Writing from the 1970ies to the Present (2023-).