Mira 'Assaf Kafantaris

Salamāt!

I am an Assistant Professor of English and Race, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Butler University, specializing in Premodern Critical Race Studies, Shakespeare, and Early Modern Culture. I am a 2023-2024 Folger Shakespeare Library Long-Term fellow. I am completing my first manuscript, titled Royal Marriage, Foreign Queens, and Constructions of Race in Early Modern England (under contract with ACMRS Press).

My book chapters have appeared in Race and/as Affect; The Palgrave Handbook of Shakespeare’s Queens; and The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Ben Jonson (with Richard Dutton).  I co-edited, with Sonja Drimmer and Treva B. Lindsey, an open-access special issue of the Barnard Center for Research on Women’s journal, The Scholar and Feminist Online, titled “Race-ing Queens.” A new commissioned article on the mobility of racialized foreign queens is forthcoming in The Oxford Handbook of Travel, Identity, and Race in Early Modern England, edited by Nandini Das. My current work includes an edited collection (with Urvashi Chakravarty) on early modern queenship, premodern critical race studies, and queer theory for Palgrave’s Early Modern Cultural Studies Series. I am also writing the introduction to Antony and Cleopatra for the Oxford World Series.

My public humanities essays have appeared in several online publications, including Shakespeare Globe,  The Sundial, The Millions, Overland Journal, The Rambling, The Conversation, Medium-Equity, and The Platform.

My work has been supported by generous grants and fellowship from The Folger Shakespeare Library, The Shakespeare Association of America, The Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies (ACMRS), The Renaissance Society of America, The Women’s Place at The Ohio State University; The Muslim Studies Endowment (Butler), and NEH/Frederic M. Ayres Fund (Butler).

In 2021, I was an ACMRS Short-Term Fellow.

In 2021-22, I was Folger Shakespeare Library and Society for the Study of Early Women and Gender Margaret Hannay Fellow.

 

Professional Statement: As an immigrant, an uninvited guest, and a minority faculty, I embody an anti-racist, intersectional, and decolonial agenda in my teaching, research, and service. My professional mission is to be a vital member of collectives working for global social justice. I value collegiality, collaborations, the “care that carries,” to adapt from the poet Claudia Rankine. In my role, I seek to be a compassionate teacher, a committed scholar, a vocal activist who opens doors, makes connections, elevates, and sustains my communities in the struggle for liberation.