Professor, English Sujata Iyengar, Distinguished Research Professor, works on early modern literature and theories of identity; book history; and adaptation studies. Recent woman-centered publications include Shakespeare and Adaptation (2023), which includes a chapter that contextualizes adaptations of Shakespeare's Twelfth Night through the history of feminist, queer, and trans theories and "Queen of Egypt and Queen of the Bey-Hive: Sophie Okonedo's Cleopatra at the National Theatre (2018)" which argues that Okonedo performed Shakespeare's heroine through the lens of transnational Black feminist intellectual and artistic community and particularly through the oeuvre of Beyoncé. Current work includes three essays on early modern women's relationship to colonialism: a consideration of the Ethiopian Orthodox (Tewahedo) saint and theologian Walatta Petros, the Mogul princess and biographer Gulbadan Begum, the Spanish American criolla poet and dramatist Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, and Aphra Behn, the Restoration English playwright and novelist; a survey of whiteness in the scholarship of early modern women's writing; and a chapter in the forthcoming Oxford Handbook to Margaret Cavendish on Cavendish's engagement with race and colonialism in her life and works.
