Rahele Jomepour Bell

Research Interests: 

Rahele's research approaches storytelling as both an inheritance and an emerging technology. Raised in a rich Persian culture shaped by oral tradition; stories carried mouth to mouth from one generation to the next long before they were written down; she is drawn to narrative that serves every stage of life, from the picture books she creates for children to stories that carry meaning for older adults. This lifelong engagement with narrative took formal shape during her MFA studies, where her thesis examined narrative illustration and painting as communicative frameworks. Specifically, it investigated how images, operating independently or in pairs with text, construct meaning and articulate complex social, political, emotional, and structural logic.

A related thread of her research considers music's relationship to the art of storytelling, particularly for children. Rhythm, melody, and song sit alongside oral and illustrated narrative as some of the earliest structures through which children encounter story, and she is interested in how musical form-repetition, cadence, refrain-shapes memory, meaning, and emotional resonance in narratives written for young readers.

Her future research area will extend this practice into new territory: the potential of storytelling in the age of AI and virtual reality. In VR, she is developing interactive narratives that let a reader step inside the story and inhabit its main character, turning reading from observation into embodied experience. In parallel, she is exploring how AI can open storytelling across different layers, from literature to science, surfacing new narrative structures and forms that a single medium alone could not contain.

A second focus of her research investigates the visual language of shape and form as a tool for children's education, including ongoing work on evidence for the development of structural reasoning through visual art.

Her research also explores how migration and diversity shape storytelling in oral, illustrated, immersive, and computational forms. She is particularly interested in how these forces influence narrative, from the time a child's identity is formed, through the experiences of children whose lives are directly or indirectly impacted by migration, to those who, even if not directly affected, are nonetheless involved in and influenced by these stories. In this way, her work investigates how storytelling serves as a bridge to understanding identity, difference, and shared experience across generations and backgrounds.

Running alongside these themes is an ongoing area of interest in women's studies, particularly how gender shapes the stories that are told, who is positioned to tell them, and whose experience becomes central to a narrative. This lens informs her broader inquiry into identity and voice, asking how storytelling, oral, illustrated, immersive, or computational, can center perspectives, including women's and children's, that have historically been told about rather than by.