Mira Assaf Kafantaris

Mira ‘Assaf Kafantaris is Assistant Professor of English and Race, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Butler University. She specializes in Premodern Critical Race Studies, Shakespeare, and Early Modern Culture. She is completing her first manuscript, titled Royal Marriage, Foreign Queens, and Racial Formations in the Early Modern Period. Her 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). A new article on the mobility of foreign queens is forthcoming in The Oxford Handbook of Travel, Identity, and Race in Early Modern England, edited by Nandini Das. Her public humanities essays have appeared in several online publications, including  The Sundial, The Millions, Overland Journal, The Rambling, The Conversation, Medium-Equity, and The Platform. She co-edited, with Sonja Drimmer and Treva B. Lindsey, a special issue of the Barnard Center for Research on Women’s journal, The Scholar and Feminist Online, titled “Race-ing Queens.” Her 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. She is also writing the introduction to Antony and Cleopatra for the Oxford World Series.