About

Rahel [ra'ɛl] is a linguist, photographer, video editor, content creator, and freelancer.

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Her creative work spans from photography and video editing to digital design, writing, and science communication.

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She uploads biweekly videos on her main YouTube channel The Stories' Eater (movie and tv recommendations, reviews, cinema deep dives) and whenever possible, on her second channel Rahel's Log (vlogs, travel tips and cultural insights).

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In June 2024, she launched her online Stationery Shop where you can purchase notebooks, journals and posters.

In collaboration with fellow researchers Yvonne Treis, Yoseph Yonas Zecharias, Andrew Harvey, and Jeremy Coburn, she designed culturally appropriate visual alphabets for endangered or less-known languages in the Horn of Africa.

You can find the following alphabets printed on the cover of spiral-bound notebooks and posters available all year round in her online shop: 

• Kambaata (Ethiopia),

• Gorwaa (Tanzania),

• Hadza (Tanzania), and

• English for Ethiopians ("My first ABC", with Amharic and Latin script).

If you want Rahel to design an alphabet for a language you work on or are a speaker of, feel free to contact her: thestorieseater@rahel-t-dires.com 

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In 2023, she started a YouTube channel called The Stories' Eater where she initially shared her fieldwork experience as an independent researcher, her views on cinema and academia, as well as her passion for stories in a broad sense. In 2024, she split her videos into two channels: one devoted to Cinema (and formerly Linguistics and Academia), and the other to Vlogs, Travel Tips, and Cultural Insights. 

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In 2026, she became the designer, video editor, and social media manager of the AFROBEE Project: 

Research project AFROBEE on The language of beekeeping and honey hunting in Africa (ANR-25-CE54-2522, 2026-2029), hosted at CNRS-LLACAN (Villejuif/France) and CFEE (Addis Ababa/Ethiopia).

​​She manages and creates audiovisual material for the AFROBEE Project's Instagram and Facebook accounts as well as the project's YouTube channel. 

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On Buymeacoffee and Patreon, you can support her creative endeavours. 

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Rahel is interested in sustainability and making informed decisions to fight climate change by taking small daily actions.

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Academia

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Recent academic experience: Visiting scholar at LLACAN (CNRS Villejuif, Paris), awardee of a Labex EFL scholarship, September-December 2022. Through this experience, she met the colleagues she's collaborating with on the Afrobee Project.

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Her BA thesis focused on analysing and collecting loanwords from Italian, English and French into Amharic. During her MA studies, her interest in Afroasiatic languages increased: her thesis was a study on situatives in Somali and Amharic, through the innovative Constructive Adpositional Grammars (CxAdGrams) framework. Her current project is a typological study on singulatives in Cushitic languages. 

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Her doctoral research in Linguistics at the Department of Languages, University of Helsinki, is currently on hold.

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