Research

Book Projects

Anti-Racist Shakespeare argues that Shakespeare is a productive site to cultivate an anti-racist pedagogy. Our study outlines the necessary theoretical foundations for educators to develop a critical understanding of the longue durée of racial formation so that they can implement anti-racist pedagogical strategies and interventions in their classrooms. This Element advances teaching Shakespeare through race and anti-racism in order to expose students to the unequal structures of power and domination that are systemically reproduced within society, culture, academic disciplines, and classrooms. We contend that this approach to teaching Shakespeare and race empowers students not only to see these paradigms but also to take action by challenging and overturning them.

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Dr. Mehdizadeh’s monograph-in-progress, Translating Persia in Early Modern English Writing, argues that England shaped its vision for imperial progress according to its fantasies of Persia in the early modern literary imagination. Popular early modern English literature, including translations of classical texts and biblical commentary about the ancient Achaemenid empire (550–330 BCE) taught English readers that Persia was always meant to be superseded by more enlightened civilizations. Early modern dramatic literature, poetry, epics, and atlases represented Persia within this supersessionary logic, continually rehearsing Persia’s fall as an ideological origin point for England’s imperial future. But this attempt to “Englysh” Persia—to make it accessible by rendering it legible according to English desires—ultimately failed to yield sustained intimacy with the Safavid empire (1501-1722 CE). The Safavid shahs whom English travelers encountered on their journeys to Persia refused every attempt at an exclusive Anglo-Persian trade agreement. Far from an inert empire in ruins, Safavid Persia was a thriving metropolis that forced English rulers to direct their global ambitions elsewhere, further delaying England’s already belated attempts at mercantile and imperial expansion.

Selected Scholarly Publications

“‘In Her Prophetic Fury’: Teaching Shakespeare Adaptation as Intervention.” Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Race, edited by Patricia Akhimie. Oxford University Press, 2023. 594-601.

“Drowning the First Folio: Co-laboring and the Value of Knowledge in The Tempest.” Shakespeare Quarterly 74, no. 3 (Fall 2023): 233–46.

“Thomas Munro and the Politics of Translation.” PMLA 138, no. 3 (2023): 748–58.

“Cosmography and/in the Academy: Authorizing the Ideological Pathways of Empire.” Exemplaria 35:1 (2023): 66-89.

“Robert Sherley and the Persian Habit.” England’s Asian Renaissance, edited by Su Fang Ng and Carmen Nocentelli. University of Delaware Press, 2021. 55-78.

“Othello in Harlem: Transforming Theater in Djanet Sears’ Harlem Duet.” Shakespeare and Black America, Special Issue of Journal of American Studies, edited by Patricia Cahill and Kim F. Hall, 54:1 (2020): 12-18.

“The Petrification of Rostam: Thomas Herbert’s re-vision of Persia in A Relation of Some Yeares Travaile.” Re-mapping Travel Narratives in the Early Modern World: to the East and Back again, edited by Montserrat Piera. ARC Humanities Press, 2018. 111-127.

Selected Public-Facing Publications

“Thomas Coryate and the Theatre of the East,” Medieval and Early Modern Orients blog, May 2021.

“The Last Goodbye: Robert Sherley’s “Vltimum Vale” in Safavid Persia,” Medieval and Early Modern Orients blog, August 2020.

“Safavid Empire: Timeline and Overview,” Medieval and Early Modern Orients blog, June 2020.

“‘Why are we changing maps?’: Teaching Transnational Encounter with Edward Terry’s A Voyage to East India.” This Rough Magic (December 2014).