Abstracts and Bios

Alya Hussain (Independent), Ecophobia, Environmental Toxicity, and the Migrant ‘Other’ in Shakespeare’s Othello and The Tempest

Abstract:

Alya Hussain will explore how Shakespeare's alignment of racialised characters (pertaining to the Islamic worlds) with nature and animals coalesces with ecophobia. She argues that ecophobia can be read as an imperialist ideology that underpins representations of colonial subjects as barbaric and unpredictable, in need of harnessing just like natural phenomena or resource. Caliban in The Tempest, for example, is represented as racially unrecognisable, thus highlighting Occidental anxieties about racial mingling and the formations of Euro-Islamic bodies. This paper will also turn to presentist readings of toxicity, the formation of weather events due to climate change, and the disproportionate effects upon those in the global South (conceptualised through water and weather permeating human boundaries, just as migrants do in The Tempest), shipwrecks (as concepts of slow violence), as well as racial toxicity in permeating boundaries through intermixing (as Othello assimilates himself into Venetian society yet still exists as a somewhat marginalised individual).

Bio:

Alya Hussain is a second-year English Literature student at the University of Manchester. Her research interests lie in the intersections between gender and race in Early Modern literature and drama. She is also interested in discovering and debating parallels between 16th century literature and contemporary literature, in particular gender tropes that have been translated through time. Alya is currently focusing on Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko (1688), specifically the relationship between Imoinda and the people of the New World’s fascination with her. Through analysing the rhetoric of her beauty and allure, Alya is looking to expand on the discourse of Early Modern views on the commodification of women outside the New World.

Dr Frances Ringwood (University of Zululand), Visions of healing: tracing the influence of hallucinogenic substances from the Near-and Middle-East on Medieval dream narratives

Abstract:

Mushrooms have long been associated with liminality. In The Tempest, Shakespeare writes about ‘demi-puppets’ who ‘By moonshine do the green sour ringlets make, / Whereof the ewe not bites and you whose pastime/ Is to make midnight mushrooms’ (V.i.42–45). These strange decomposers were viewed with suspicion as doorway between worlds, which may lead to a land filled with fairies or the dead. Not all attitudes towards mushrooms were quite so whimsical. St. Hildegard of Bingen, for example, wrote facts about mushrooms that are only being confirmed scientifically today. Also, while monks are known to have dabbled in hallucinogenics in pursuit of their holy visions, there is no written evidence of magic mushroom use in England until well after the Renaissance. That does not mean there is no evidence whatsoever. The art world has divulged church windows, doors, walls and psalters, all produced shortly after the crusades, exulting a range of mushroom species. Knowledge of the medicinal properties of mushrooms had persisted in Europe since antiquity in the works of Hippocrates and Galen, but the fungi they prescribe are far from magical. The crusaders’ expeditions to the East saw them bringing back new knowledge of a range of hallucinogenic substances, among which mushrooms were just one. Far from being demonised, the medicinal role of these substances was emphasised. For example, opium poppies (papaver somniferum) were used for treating stomach complaints. In this paper, I will trace the history of using hallucinogenics from the East medicinally, contextualising the role of indigestion in the strange dreams found in the Medieval dream narrative.

Bio:

Dr Frances Ringwood is the author of two peer-reviewed articles on Shakespeare’s drama and a further article on Sol Plaatje’s novel Mhudi. She has also delivered conference papers on Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and on Milton’s Paradise Lost, contributing to scholarly conversations across medieval and early modern studies. An active participant in scholarly dialogues, she serves on three academic committees and regularly engages interlocutors on her core research interests—Romance in medieval, Renaissance, and African literary traditions, feminism, and ecocriticism. Her current committee memberships include the University of Zululand’s Women of Research in the Humanities and Social Sciences initiative, the Shakespeare Society of Southern Africa, and the organising committee of the Southern African Society for Medieval and Renaissance Studies.

Dr Eduardo Ramos (Arizona State University), 'Richard I’s territorial ambition in Robert Mannyng of Brune’s Chronicle'

Abstract:

English colonial ambition long predated the rise of the British Empire, a fact reflected in medieval historical writings. Richard I was among the most popular kings of England during the Middle Age because of his role in the Third Crusade (1189-1192). Yet, despite his military victories, Richard ultimately failed to capture Jerusalem or establish a lasting presence in the Levant. Robert Mannyng of Brune’s Chronicle (1338), compiled in the vernacular for an English audience, explicitly states Richard’s goal of territorial acquisition and his brutal approach to achieve it, both facts corroborated in sources contemporaneous with Richard I. However, as the Chronicle begins to detail the losses accrued by Richard in his victories over the Ayyubid sultan Salah al-Din and military threats to his territories in Europe, Richard abandons his colonial aspirations in the Levant and returns to Europe. The Chronicle depicts Richard as undermining the legitimacy of the inhabitants’ claims over their lands in the Levant by presenting that land as Christian heritage and demanding its partition. Yet despite his military victories, English presence in the Levant ultimately proves untenable, and Richard leaves without achieving the stated expansionist goals. Robert Mannyng’s Chronicle lays bare Richard’s territorial ambition without obscuring his violent methods. Rather, religious arguments are advanced to legitimize his land-grab. Once expansionism proves unprofitable, these religious claims over the land are abandoned further underscoring the colonial motivations of Richard’s crusade.

Bio:

Eduardo Ramos is Assistant Professor of Literature at Arizona State University. He holds a PhD in English from Penn State University and an MA in Medieval Icelandic studies from the University of Iceland. His research addresses constructions of identity and empire in medieval English and Icelandic literature with a focus on cross-cultural contact. His work has appeared in such journals as Speculum, Arthuriana, Literature Compass, postmedieval, and Comitatus.  

Dr Nora Galland (University of Bretagne Occidentale), 'Theatre of the Spectre: Haunting, Memory, and Trauma in Isabella Hammad's Enter Ghost and Shakespeare's Hamlet

Abstract:

Isabella Hammad’s Enter Ghost (2023) weaves a complex narrative of displacement, political struggle, and artistic resistance through the lens of a British-Palestinian actress returning to the West Bank. Engaging with PCRS, this paper explores how the novel deals with colonialism and occupation, positioning Palestine as a site where histories of race, empire, and cultural erasure intersect. By staging Hamlet as an act of resistance, Enter Ghost not only critiques the legacies of British and Israeli settler colonialism but also explores how race and power shape both individual and collective identities in an occupied landscape. Drawing on postcolonial critical theory, this paper will explore how Hammad deconstructs racial hierarchies within the Palestinian struggle, questioning whether the ghostly presence of colonial violence can ever be exorcised. Sonia, the protagonist, embodies a diasporic subjectivity caught between British liberalism and Palestinian resistance. Additionally, this paper will analyze how the novel engages with the necropolitics of occupation, exposing how racialized violence dictates who may live, who must die, and who is rendered spectrally absent in the global imaginary. Ultimately, this paper argues that Enter Ghost reconfigures Shakespearean tragedy as a racialized and political narrative, using theater as a mode of decolonial storytelling. In doing so, Hammad challenges dominant racial scripts and reclaims performance as an act of defiant self-determination, confronting the silences imposed by settler colonialism.

Bio:

 Dr Nora Galland is a Teaching and Research Fellow at University of Bretagne Occidentale, France. Her research interests include race in early modern English culture and drama, the dialectics of identity and alterity, words of abuse and invective as well as adaptations and appropriations of Shakespeare's plays. She is also interested in intersectionality and ecocriticism. She published her work in Cahiers Elisabéthains, Arrêt sur Scènes/Scene Focus, Les Cahiers Shakespeare en Devenir, Multicultural Shakespeare: Translation, Appropriation and Performance, Shakespeare Survey and L’œil du Spectateur. She is currently working on a monograph Racist Abuse in Early Modern English Drama: From Racist Weapon to Antiracist Shield (The Arden Shakespeare, Bloomsbury, forthcoming 2027).

Amelia Ali (Emory University), '"Blue Veins”: Orientalism, Blackness, & the Geography of Shakespeare's Imperial Lovers'

Abstract:

Most scholarship on Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra notice the play’s thematic bifurcations Rome/Egypt; masculine/feminine; nature/culture; life/death; etc. Notably, we notice how an ecocritical rendering of this play remythologizes the world whereby the tragedy’s sacrificial economy suggests a reparative, afterlife reading. However, ecocriticism often underestimates the colonial ecology that links racialized and subaltern subjects to space. This paper’s overriding interest in Cleopatra’s material body recognizes how it booms much contrivance. Rather than foreclose on identity in dichotomous way, this paper illuminates structurally and mutually constitutive legacies of violent conquest and caste.

Moreover, while some scholars lament the whitewashing of our protagonist, such grievances obfuscate imperial conquest. There is profound neglect regarding how her body and the land are transracially conceptualized. Not only does the play compel us to notice the performance of race, but also how land and racialized subaltern subjects become one in the same. There is no bifurcation. Attending to the racialization of place illuminates how MENA is depoliticized in continental Indigenous African and diasporic imaginaries. They are unruly and need to be enclosed upon, made into property whereby the space no longer exists in the commons but only through the individual. In the case of our Egyptian queen, power vested in the one, power vested in the individual only needs to be eradicated. As imperial domination extends, mutually violent ecosystems make opaque the ruins of empire. Therefore, perhaps we can instead consider how ethnic stratification works in tandem with spatial processes of deterritorialization and displacement.

Bio:

Amelia Ali (she/her/hers) is a second-year doctoral student whose research investigates literary and cultural constructions of indigeneity in Afro-diaporic and Native American literature to examine what it means to be considered “native” to a space, particularly in the context of a climate changing world. Her research aims to explore their overlap through ecofeminist frameworks to consider the reclamation and continuity of (re)memory, traditions, kinship, bodily autonomy, and planetarity. In addition to interrogating dispossession transiting through empire, she thinks through ecofeminist ideas of enclosure, death practices, folklore, futurity, and theatre for Blackness and Indigeneity. Her research aims to assess discursive and rhetorical modes of Afrofuturism and Indigenous futurity

using an Afro-optimism (Black Ops) lens.

Dr Rhema Hokama (University of Washington), 'Protestantism in the Global Renaissance: How a late medieval Arabic tale came to colonial America and the Dutch Republic'

Abstract:

I propose to discuss my current book project on cosmopolitanism in early modern global Protestantism, focusing on how English and Dutch Protestant identities were shaped by engagement with Islam, East and Southeast Asian religions, and the indigenous religions of the Americas. In my talk, I will explore the cultural afterlife of Hayy Ibn Yaqzan, an Arabic-language fable about a boy who grows up on a deserted island, which I have taught in my global literatures courses in Singapore and Seattle.

Hayy Ibn Yazqan is a quintessential global text, and one that had a long and varied reception in the Western world. In the 1630s, the English Arabist Edward Pococke arrived in Aleppo to acquire Near Eastern manuscripts. Among the manuscripts that Pococke brought back to Oxford was Hayy Ibn Yaqzan, which was written in the twelfth century by the Andalusian physician and polymath Ibn Tufayl. The fable chronicles the tale of the protagonist Hayy, who uses nothing but his sense perception and reason to teach himself natural science and the tenets of Islam.

Scholarship on the European reception of Ibn Tufayl’s fable is scant, and focuses on the text’s secular influence on Enlightenment thinkers such as John Locke. I aim to explore the religious import of earlier Anglo-American and Dutch interests in Ibn Tufayl’s tale, which have been overlooked in studies of the text’s circulation. I argue that Protestant dissenters—including colonial American Quakers and radical Dutch printers—saw in the fable’s non-Christian protagonist a mouthpiece for their own varieties of nonconformist religion.

Bio:

Rhema Hokama is assistant professor of English literature at the University of Washington and was previously associate professor of English at Singapore University of Technology and Design, a new university established in collaboration with MIT. She is the author of Devotional Experience and Erotic Knowledge in the Literary Culture of the English Reformation (Oxford University Press, 2023), which argues that Renaissance poetic responses to the English Reformation imagined capacious Protestant identities—ones that included unconventional and nonheteronormative desires within the broad tent of Reformed religion.

Rhema’s newer research interests grew out of her time living and teaching in Asia and center on the development of Protestantism in the global Renaissance. She is currently working on a second book project about how early modern global exchange with East and Southeast Asia, the Near East, and the Atlantic world shaped European discourse about national, political, and religious inclusion in early modern England and the Dutch Republic.

Prof Catherine Gaullier-Bougassas (University of Caen Normandie), European translations of Mubaššir’s Maxims and Wise Sayings and appropriation of his memory of ancient Greece (13th-15th centuries): new encounters between ‘East’ and ‘West’

Abstract:

According to the vision of history constructed by many European authors of the Middle Ages and the 16th Century, ancient Greek culture was transmitted to Western Europe through the intermediary of ancient and then Christian Rome, along a strictly European path. We know that this idea of the transmission of the ancient Greek heritage without an intermediary from outside Europe dominated in Europe for centuries. It overshadowed the role played by the Muslim world and sought to impose the idea that ancient Greece had been ‘captured’ by Europe alone. While studies have now focused on the mediation of Arabic translations of Greek philosophical texts, less attention has been paid to the European legacy of less scholarly but more widely read Arabic texts, which enabled Muslim culture to reach a wider audience. My aim here is to explore the influence in Europe of an 11th-century Egyptian work in Europe, Mubaššir ibn Fatik's Mukhtâr al-hikam wa-mahasin al-kalim. In this history of ancient philosophy, the ancient philosophers are converted to a monotheism that heralded Islam, and celebrated for their political thought and piety. This text was transmitted throughout Europe in a chain of linguistic and cultural transfers: translated into Castilian in the 13th C., then into Latin, French and English. Guillaume de Tignonville's French text was translated into English five times in the 15th C., most notably by Stephen Scrope and Anthony Woodwille. Woodwille's translation was printed several times in the 15th and 16th C. The first print was by William Caxton in 1477 and probably constitutes the first English text to be printed. So it was the translation of an Arabic text, heavily influenced by Islamic religious thought, that Caxton chose to bring English into the world of print. I will study the prologues and the various translations of the Life of Aristotle in order to analyse how the authors appropriated this memory of ancient Greece elaborated by a Muslim author. I will analyse the points of encounter between Islamic thought and European Christian thought as reflected in the adaptations, the data taken from the Arabic text and the cultural interactions in the representation of the Greek philosopher. I will also consider the success in pre-modern Europe of another Arabic work, The Secret of Secrets, attributed to Aristotle, in particular to see how European authors masked or manifested the Islamic origin of these texts.

Bio:

Catherine Gaullier-Bougassas is Professor of Medieval French Language and Literature at the University of Caen Normandie (France) and she is a specialist of the reception of Antiquity in the Middle Ages and at the beginning of the sixteenth century, of medieval writings of history and the novel, and of representations of the Orient in the Middle Ages.

She is the principal investigator of the ERC Advanced Grant AGRELITA, « The Reception of Ancient Greece in pre-modern French Literature and Illustrations of Manuscripts and Printed Books (1320-1550): How Invented Memories shaped the Identity of European Communities ». (European Research Council, 2021-2027, project No 101018777) : https://agrelita.hypotheses.org

She is editor-in-chief of the series “Recherches sur les receptions de l’Antiquité” and co-editor-in-chief of the series “Alexander redivivus”, published by Brepols. Publications: https://cv.hal.science/catherine-gaullier-bougassas

Dr Lea Puljcan Juric (Fordham University), ‘Bartol Đurđević’s Turk in English Translation’

Abstract:

I propose to discuss the only two translations into English of De turcarum moribus epitome (Rome, 1552), written in Latin by Bartol Đurđević (c. 1505-c. 1569, better known as Bartolomej Georgijevic or by variant names), a Croatian soldier, ethnographer, pilgrim, and devout Roman Catholic who spent at least nine years in Turkish captivity. Đurđević’s text, which itself contains some of his translations from Turkish and Croatian into Latin, was widely circulated in Europe and translated into several languages, including as The ofspring of the house of Ottomanno (1569) by Hugh Goughe, and as The rarities of Turkey (1661) by an anonymous translator. These texts were instrumental in expanding England’s knowledge about Christendom’s Muslim adversary, and yet they have never been studied as translations, nor have they been compared to each other or to Đurđević’s Latin text, as I do in this paper. I focus on the translators’ prefatory material, notes, omissions, additions, and other strategies to gauge what drove the translations and what they reveal about England’s position on the Ottoman wars in Europe and in relation to other empires as it was building its own. The texts reveal in the space of translation some of the same transcultural movement, confusion, negotiation, and anxieties that travel, commerce, and warfare implied. When viewed diachronically, that space is revealed as dynamic and fluid, upset by the translators’ interventions that were driven by their ideological investment in the high-stakes domestic and international politics specific to their historical moments.

Bio:

Lea Puljcan Juric is a Senior Lecturer in English at Fordham University in New York. Her areas of interest include early modern English and European literature and culture, translation, and colonial and postcolonial studies. She has published a book, Illyria in Shakespeare’s England (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2019) as well as articles and book reviews in leading peer-reviewed journals, such as English Literary Renaissance, Shakespeare Jahrbuch, Early Modern Women: An Interdisciplinary Journal, and Notes and Queries. Dr. Puljcan Juric has presented her work at local and national symposiums and conferences, including the annual meetings of the Shakespeare Association of America, the Renaissance Society of America, and the Sixteenth-Century Society, and has won various fellowships and grants for her research.

Dr Munire Zeyneb Maksudoglu (University of Sussex), 'Safe-conduct letters as the emblem of global order and sovereignty'

Abstract:

I am going to talk about safe conduct letters as a Muslim diplomatic practice during the early modern period. The material power of letters in early cross-cultural exchanges have been discussed in recent scholarship. However, safe conduct letters especially in maritime travel and trade, and its representation in Early Modern literature is not paid enough attention. I am going to discuss safe conduct letters through the lens of literature and drama especially in Christopher Marlowe’s Tamburlaine I and Richard Hakluyt’s Principal Navigations and argue that it became an emblem of Muslim control over trade routes in pre-colonial times.

A safe-conduct was usually addressed to the officials on the relevant route and was carried by the traveller like a passport. Since the early Middle Ages, it was Islamic practice to grant a safe-conduct letter to those harbi (foreigners) who travelled through a Muslim country to offer them protection under Islamic law, which did not necessarily govern them. Christian pilgrims travelling to Jerusalem or Venetian merchants trading in the Mamluk territories used to carry them. 

Many early modern Englishmen trading or traveling in the Levant, North Africa, and Eastern Europe, such as merchants and pilgrims sought to acquire such a safe-conduct from the Ottoman sultan by petitioning the Ottoman court, usually through the English agent or in person. These documents composed in Turkish featured a tuğra, an exquisitely designed calligraphic monogram of the sultan which was crucial because this is what the officer or the corsair the Englishman met at the Mediterranean or elsewhere in his voyage would first check as corsairs likely were illiterate. 

Christopher Marlowe is the first playwright to use a safe conduct letter as a prop in Renaissance drama. Tamburlaine I starts with Egyptian princess Zenocrate trying to get safe passage from Tamburlaine by procuring a safe conduct letter issued by ‘the mighty Turk’ (1Tamburlaine 1.2.13-16). Likewise, Richard Hakluyt featured one that is obtained by an English merchant from Kanuni Sultan Suleyman in his Principal Navigations and presented it as a great triumph of a small island nation in the periphery of Europe. 

Safe conduct letter is an interesting piece of diplomatic practice that symbolised Muslim sovereignty over important trade routes in English eyes. Through literature safe conduct letters brought the Muslim sovereignty to the audiences and readership at home who might have never had any encounter with the Turks otherwise. 

Bio:

Dr Münire Zeyneb Maksudoğlu completed her BA in English at the International Islamic University Malaysia (IIUM). She did her master's at Lincoln College, Oxford through Middlebury College BLSE program. She taught and studied at the University of Sussex where she received her D.Phil in English Literature. Her CIRS funded research considered Anglo-Ottoman encounters on the page and on the stage in Early Modern England. Her research interests include Renaissance Drama, histories of diplomacy and material culture in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. She is a member of Medieval and Early Modern Orients (MEMOs) and co-editor of Islam in Victorian Liverpool: An Ottoman Account of Britain’s First Mosque Community (Claritas, 2021).

Dr. Murat Öğütcü (Adıyaman University), 'Shakespeare’s Contemporaries in Ottoman Türkiye'

Abstract:

While there is a relatively wealth of textual evidence regarding the dramatic forms, texts, playwrights and actors of Shakespeare’s era, the same cannot be said for his Ottoman counterparts. Early modern Ottoman drama could be divided into one-actor and group performances. The Meddah, who were improvisational stand-up comedians, combined the diegetic and the dramatic in their lively storytelling. The Mudhik (comedians) and Mukallid (impersonators), conversely, were performers who worked in certain guilds and sub-guilds called Kol (branches) that functioned more or less like their counterparts of theatre companies in Europe. Despite the lack of detailed biographies of individual playwrights and actors, we do have preserved texts outlining the plots of their stories and performances which were often improvised and reminiscent of comedia dell’arte. Despite these differences, there is much more common ground between the dramatic forms found in Shakespeare’s time and those present in Ottoman dramatic entertainment. While Ottoman storytellers bear similarities with Choruses, through a comparison between acting spaces in especially court drama, understandings of comic genres, the use of anti-masques, actor-audience involvement in original practices, and the use of stage effects like pyrotechnics, we can gain a deeper understanding of how drama was performed and enjoyed in both cultural contexts. Therefore, this chapter will examine storytelling techniques, performance styles, and dramatic elements of early modern English and Ottoman dramatic traditions to underscore the common grounds of these seemingly disconnected regions.

Keywords: William Shakespeare, Türkiye, Ottoman, storytelling, performance styles, dramatic elements

Bio:

Assoc. Prof. Dr. Murat Öğütcü received his PhD degree from the Department of English Language and Literature at Hacettepe University, Türkiye, in 2016. From August 2012 to January 2013, he was a visiting scholar at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He is currently working at Adıyaman University, Türkiye. He is the General Editor of the “Turkish Shakespeares” Project which aims to introduce texts, productions and research on Turkish Shakespeares to a broader international audience of students, teachers, and researchers. He is also a researcher at the AHRC-funded “Medieval and Early Modern Orients” project which aims to contribute to our understanding of the medieval and early modern encounters between England and the Islamic Worlds. He is among the regional editors of the Global Shakespeares Project and the World Shakespeare Bibliography. He is co-editor of Materializing the East in Early Modern English Drama (Bloomsbury, 2023). He has written book chapters and articles on his research interests, including early modern studies, Shakespeare, and cultural studies.

Dr Philip Goldfarb Styrt (Ambrose University), 'The Ottomans as a Normal Empire in Christopher Marlowe'

Abstract:

In this paper, I look at Christopher Marlowe’s depiction of the Euro-Islamic encounters through his portrayal of the Ottoman Empire in The Jew of Malta and the two parts of Tamburlaine. I argue that Marlowe’s Ottoman Empire has major flaws—particularly as a result of the difficulty of getting subordinates to do what the emperor desires—but that these flaws are not marked by these plays as unique failures of the Ottoman empire, but rather as problems inherent to the management of any empire. In other words, the Ottomans’ problems are normal, both in the sense that the Ottomans are not depicted as unusually flawed but also in the sense that the issues they face are represented as a norm, a representative, standard version of empire: their problems are problems with empire, not with the Ottomans themselves. 

As a result, I suggest, the failures of Ottoman delegation in these plays do not serve as anti-Turkish or anti-Islamic statements that imply that the Ottomans are illegitimate rulers. Instead, they function as a warning about the efficacy of empire more generally, one particularly relevant for the English themselves at a time when their empire was more theoretical than real. Marlowe thus uses his depiction of the Ottoman empire and its difficult relation to subordinates to demonstrate skepticism about the value of empire more generally, rather than to critique the Ottomans themselves.

Bio:

Philip Goldfarb Styrt is an assistant professor of English at St. Ambrose University in Davenport, IA. His work primarily focuses on the circulation of political, religious, and historical ideas in the Renaissance and their influence on drama. He has published books on politics and setting in Shakespeare (Shakespeare’s Political Imagination, Arden/Bloomsbury 2021) and on the use of early modern drama in understanding the present (Shakespeare in the Present, Routledge 2022), and is currently working on a project about how the failures of anti-imperialism in early modern drama speak to the need to address white supremacy in contemporary contexts.

Safaa Falah Hasan Alsaragna (Istanbul Gelisim University, Karabuk University), 'Ibn Khaldun's Asabiyya and Cyclical History in the Rise and Fall of Powers: The Case in Shakespeare's Macbeth' 

Abstract:

Ibn Khaldun, a 14th-century historian and philosopher, introduced the theory of cyclical history, which explains the rise and fall of powers through asabiyya—a unifying force that strengthens or weakens political entities over time. His insights into leadership, power consolidation, and societal decline provide a framework for analyzing Shakespeare’s Macbeth, a tragedy centered on ambition, betrayal, and downfall. Macbeth’s rise and eventual demise align with Ibn Khaldun’s stages of power, wherein strong asabiyya initially enables leadership, but greed and tyranny lead to fragmentation and collapse.

This study explores how Macbeth’s ascent follows Ibn Khaldun’s model of power acquisition, beginning with his legitimacy as a noble warrior and ending with his downfall due to declining asabiyya. Lady Macbeth, as an external force, manipulates Macbeth into disrupting the natural succession of power, mirroring Ibn Khaldun’s assertion that corruption and self-interest weaken a ruler’s bond with his people. As Macbeth isolates himself and eliminates perceived threats, his loss of loyalty among his subjects marks the final stage of his rule’s decline.

By juxtaposing Ibn Khaldun’s political philosophy with Macbeth, this paper highlights the enduring relevance of asabiyya in understanding leadership dynamics across different historical and literary contexts. The study offers an interdisciplinary approach to political thought and literature, demonstrating how Shakespeare’s work resonates with timeless theories of governance and societal change.

Keywords: Ibn Khaldun, Asabiyya, Cyclical History, Macbeth, Leadership

Bio:

An Iraqi-born academic based in Istanbul, Türkiye, a lecturer at Gelişim University and a PhD candidate in English Literature at Karabuk University. My research focuses on modern theatre, which I believe offers a stronger connection with real life than other literary genres. I am also passionate about poetry and photography, mainly as a hobby. My educational journey spans multiple countries, from East Asia to the Middle East and across Eastern and Western Europe, enriching my interdisciplinary perspective. In addition to my teaching role, I have an extensive administrative experience and currently serving as commination coordinator at Gelişim University.

Dr Lubaaba Al-Azami (Queen Mary University of London) and Dr Salman Al-Azami (Liverpool Hope University), 'Seeking Sycorax: The Tempest's Islamic Ghosts from Shakespeare to Dhaka Theatre (2012)' 

Bios:

Dr Lubaaba Al-Azami is a lecturer in English at Queen Mary, University of London and research fellow at the University of Liverpool. Her first book, Travellers in the Golden Realm: How Mughal India Connected England to the World (John Murray, 2024) was shortlisted for the British in India Book Prize 2025. Her research centres the Global Renaissance and Shakespeare, including Anglo-European encounters with the Islamic Worlds, dramatic representations of the 'East', travel and transculturality, premodern critical race studies, intersectionality, decolonialism and well-brewed tea. She is currently working on a new edition of Titus Andronicus with Cambridge University Press, and her second monograph on the representation of Indian queens on Renaissance English stages. Previously, Lubaaba was Lecturer in Shakespeare and Early Modern Literature at the University of Manchester. She completed her AHRC-funded PhD in English Literature at the University of Liverpool.

Dr Salman Al-Azami is a senior lecturer in Language, Media and Communication and the Level C Coordinator for English Language at the School of Humanities, Liverpool Hope University. His areas of expertise are language, religion and the media, Language of Islamophobia, multilingualism, language in education, language and diversity, language maintenance and shift, political discourse, and South Asian popular culture. Dr. Al-Azami is the author of several publications, including: Media Language on Islam and Muslims: Terminologies and Their Effects (Palgrave, 2023); Religion in the Media: A Linguistic Analysis (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), and Language of Advertising in Bangladesh (Open House Press, 2007).

Bárbara P A Lima (Independent), 'Imagined Encounters: The role of Muslim women in creating a cross-cultural Chanson de Geste'

Abstract:

The chanson de geste is an Old French epic that reimagines legends in Frankish history. Although primarily written from the twelfth to fourteenth century, the works are historical fiction. They explore ideas of cross-cultural interactions between Christians and Muslims, common during the Crusades, but set in a Carolingian society.

The epic is often described as male- and Christian-centred. However, in this paper I will challenge both interpretations. My research uses a postcolonial feminist approach to the chanson de geste, arguing that Muslim female characters have a central role in the genre. Through their marriage to Christian knights and assimilation into Frank society, they blur the division between the Muslim ‘other’ and the Christian ‘self’.

The characters form cross-cultural kinships that offer a contrasting view to the Muslim-Christian interactions commonly portrayed in crusader chronicles. Rather than opposing conversion, the chanson de geste accepts it and often expects it. The women are integrated into Christian society and can play key political roles in the texts. Nonetheless, they still maintain links to their Muslim kin, thus forming connections between the genre’s Christian heroes and their Muslim opponents. 

These connections are often ignored in scholarship as secondary to the main battle-centric plot. However, they prove vital when inspecting the genealogical side of the genre. The different cycles of the chanson de geste follow genealogies of heroes. Therefore, cross-cultural marriages are key to the Frank lineage imagined in the genre. The chanson de geste creates a lineage of heroes that come from mixed backgrounds.

Bio:

Bárbara P A Lima’s research focuses on medieval gender, exploring interdisciplinary approaches between history and literature. She wrote her master’s dissertation at the University of Oxford on the lyric genre pastourelle, analysing its constructions of consent and sexual assault. She presented this research at the Medieval Church and Culture Seminar at Oxford. During her undergraduate degree in history, she applied feminist and postcolonial approaches to the chanson de geste. Her research led her to win King’s College London’s BA History Prize in 2021. P A Lima currently works as a history teacher focusing on decolonising the UK’s Key Stage 3 curriculum. 

Prof Catherine Anne Addison (University of Zululand), 'Islamic Women Characters in Ariosto’s and Tasso’s Epic Romances'

Abstract:

The overriding context and frame narrative of all episodes and stories in Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando furioso and Torquato Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata is a war between Christians and Muslims. But the Orientalism of these substantial Renaissance texts is complicated. Both narratives, as is well known, are more focused on romance and human sentiment than the violent heroism of traditional epic. While both narrators profess a Christian interest in the Crusades that they recount, neither presents his pagan characters uniformly in a bad light, nor his Christian characters as typically virtuous. The majority of the sympathetic female characters in both texts are in fact of the Saracen camp, at least originally. Ariosto’s inimitable woman warrior, Marfisa, the femme fatale Angelica, the noble and faithful Isabella and the benevolent enchantress Melissa are all Muslims, as are Tasso’s warlike Clorinda, the complicated young princess Erminia and the lovelorn enchantress Armida. While most of these characters choose to be baptized as Christians late in the narrative, not all of them do. Moreover, conversion does not change the characters’ concept of virtue since adherents of both religions are shown as following the same ideals of courage, faithfulness and humanism. This paper will explore the depiction of Muslim women characters in these romanzi, focusing in particular on the two knights, Marfisa and Clorinda.

Bio:

Catherine Addison is a Research Fellow in the English Department at the University of Zululand. She lectured on English literature and language in the department from 1996 until 2020, when she retired from teaching as a full professor. She is a graduate of the University of Natal (now UKZN), the University of Stellenbosch and the University of British Columbia, Canada, where she completed her PhD. Although she started her career as a specialist on Romantic poetry, she has diversified over the years, receiving an MA in General Linguistics as well as teaching and writing on many different topics in language, literary theory and literary criticism. She has published on authors as diverse as Byron, Nawal El Saadawi, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Zakes Mda and Salman Rushdie; on poetry, narrative, Romanticism, the Medieval and Early Modern periods, colonial and postcolonial literature and African women’s writing; and on formal aspects of poetry such as versification, rhyme, simile and irony. In 2017 she published a book on the history of the verse-novel. Feminism has informed her writing and teaching throughout her career.

Prof Jonathan Hsy (George Washington University), 'Margery Kempe’s Muslims: Race and Disability in Transit'

Abstract:

This paper explores the intersections of race and disability in the trans-continental travels of the fifteenth-century English housewife turned mystic and pilgrim, Margery Kempe. The Book of Margery Kempe explores the protagonist’s multifaceted experiences of chronic illness, aging, and hearing voices (auditory hallucinations), and her radical identification with marginalized people throughout her travels on the Continent and the Middle East challenges readers to recognize stigmatized communities not just as passive recipients of charity but also as dynamic reciprocal agents of social change. This discussion considers Margery’s nuanced codependence with Richard an Irish hunchback (throughout her Continental travels) alongside her wordless mobile communication with an unnamed Saracen (i.e., Muslim man) in Palestine. How do medieval travelers meet and accommodate each other’s needs, across gendered and ethnic difference? What are the sociopolitical implications of travel and mobility in the Book’s capacious closing prayer that incorporates Saracens alongside heathens, bedridden men and women, and imprisoned people?

Bio:

Jonathan Hsy is Professor of English at George Washington University, where he is Affiliated Faculty in Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and the Sigur Center for Asian Studies. Founding board member of RaceB4Race and co-director of Global Chaucers, his work broadly draws connections between medieval literature and contemporary global contexts (especially race, gender, disability). He is the author of Antiracist Medievalisms: From "Yellow Peril" to Black Lives Matter (Arc Humanities Press, 2021) and co-editor of A Cultural History of Disability in the Middle Ages (Bloomsbury 2020). He is currently a long-term research fellow at the Folger Shakespeare Library, where he is completing his work for East Asian Medievalisms: Poetry, Media, Manga (Cambridge Elements: The Global Middle Ages). This talk draws from material related to his forthcoming book, Disabled Storytellers in the Global Middle Ages (Cambridge University Press).

Dr Zainab Cheema (Florida Gulf Coast University), 'Englishing the Reconquista: Translating Iberian Islam in John Dryden’s The Conquest of Granada'

Abstract:

John Dryden’s The Conquest of Granada (1670–71) offers a striking literary lens through which to examine early modern English perceptions of Spanish Islam and the 1492 Reconquista. Written in the aftermath of the English Restoration, Dryden’s heroic drama sets its action in 15th-century Granada, dramatizing the fall of the last Nasrid kingdom. As scholars such as Barbara Fuchs and Bridget Orr have discussed, Dryden constructs the Islamic Other within the frameworks of courtly love, martial honor, and dynastic rivalry, while simultaneously negotiating contemporary English anxieties about religious and political difference. However, sufficient attention has not been paid to Dryden’s Spanish language sources and the modes of translation that he employs in engaging with the Orientalist tropes within the heteroglossic and dialogic historical imagination of early modern Spanish chronicles. Engaging in close reading of Dryden’s translation strategies, I show how Dryden’s Restoration drama engages with Spanish historical reflections on Islamic convivencia to imagine Anglo-Islamic engagement and England’s place as an emergent Mediterranean and Atlantic power. By reading The Conquest of Granada within the longue durée of Spanish historical writing on Muslim Spain, the paper reveals the transnational and multilingual frameworks through which Dryden fashioned his perspective of emergent English cultural identity.

Bio:

Dr. Zainab Cheema is Assistant Professor of Early World Literature at Florida Gulf Coast University. Her teaching and research focus on contact zones in early globalizations, early modern race studies, translation movements, Anglo-Iberian cultural exchanges in early modern theatre, and contemporary film and television adaptations of medieval and early modern literature. Zainab is a member of the #ShakeRace and #RaceB4Race scholarly communities, as well as the Borderlands Shakespeare Colectiva. Zainab’s work has been supported by fellowships from the Fulbright Scholarship Program, the Folger Shakespeare Library, the Newberry Library, and the Huntington Library. She is currently working on her first book monograph supported by a Folger Long Term Fellowship for 2024-2025. Zainab has been published in English Language Notes, Shakespeare Survey, Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation, Feminist Studies, The Bulletin of the Comediantes, The Shakespeare International Yearbook and other publications.

Dr Iman Sheeha (Brunel University London), 'Shrewish Women and Emasculated Men: Percy’s Mahomet and his Heaven and Early Modern Mythologies of Islam'

Abstract:

Percy’s play opens with a white, Christian fantasy of an angry, violent, and vengeful Mohammad bent on punishing the people of Arabia for their sins. This fantasy then gives way to that of a lustful, emasculated figure. Upon meeting Epimenide, “Empresse of the Deserts”, the Prophet abandons his plans and dedicates himself to wooing her and fulfilling her every whim. In heaven, the shrewish Epimenide cuffs Mohammad on the ear, then invites him to wipe her shoe and “kiss my cul”. This paper argues that, while scholars, including the first editor of the play, Matthew Dimmock, have suggested a parallel between Epimenide and Elizabeth I, a more productive parallel could be found with the contemporary Roxelana or Hürrem Sultan, Ottoman concubine then empress. Early modern European writers found Roxelana’s extraordinary advancement from concubine to empress as well as her apparent power over the Ottoman Sultan Suleyman shocking. In commanding Mohammad’s affections and exposing his weakness to feminine wiles, Epimenide embodies some aspects of Roxelana, both reinforcing early modern stereotypical, Islamophobic views of the Prophet of Islam and performing the cultural work of depicting the Ottoman Empire as ruled by emasculated men.

Bio:

Iman Sheeha is a Senior Lecturer in Shakespeare and Early Modern Literature at Brunel University of London. She is the author of two books: Household Servants in Early Modern Domestic Tragedy (2020) and Neighbourly Relationships in Early Modern Drama: Staged Communities (2025). She has co-edited a special issue on liminal domestic spaces for Early Modern Literary Studies (2020). Her research has appeared or is forthcoming in Shakespeare Survey, Shakespeare, Early Theatre, Cahiers Élisabéthains, the Journal of Early Modern Cultural Studies, Early Modern Literary Studies, and American Notes and Queries. She contributed a chapter to People and Piety: Devotional Writing in Print and Manuscript in Early Modern England (2019).

Soumaya Boughanmi (University of Tunis), 'Whiteness and Conversion in Philip Massinger's The Renegado'

Abstract:

In this paper, I will explore the intersection of race and religion in early modern England, with a particular focus on the construction of whiteness through the theme of conversion in Philip Massinger’s The Renegado. The play depicts the encounter between Muslim Turks and Christian Europeans in Ottoman Tunis, offering a case study for the examination of stage depictions of interracial contact across the mediterranean in the early modern period. I will focus on the construction of whiteness in the play defined in opposition to the figure of the Turk, who is represented as occupying a complex racial spectrum, represented in various phenotypes including white, black, or other shades in between in addition to other racialized physical features. The stakes of conversion, both for Turks and Christians, reveal that racial identity in the period is not conceived of as fixed but rather as a fluid and mutable category—a characteristic exploited to heighten the anxiety of racial intermixing. By examining Massinger’s treatment of racial and religious convertibility, my paper seeks to expand ongoing scholarly conversations about premodern race and the role of seventeenth-century drama in shaping as well as reflecting emerging racial ideologies.

Bio:

Soumaya Boughanmi is a PhD candidate at Goethe University, Frankfurt, Germany, and a lecturer at the University of Tunis, Tunisia, where she teaches courses on English and American literature and culture. Her PhD dissertation explores interracial encounters in seventeenth-century English plays by William Shakespeare, Philip Massinger, Lodowick Carlell and others. Her research interests include early modern drama and culture, premodern critical race studies, and contemporary adaptations and appropriations of Shakespeare.

Dr Emily Soon (Singapore Management University), 'Trading Faith: Re-shaping Malukan religion in John Fletcher’s The Island Princess (ca. 1621)' 

Abstract:

Early modern European attempts to access East Indian spices resulted in a proliferation of Euro-Islamic encounters, with Westerners being especially keen to trade with the sultans of the ‘Moluccas’ (Maluku in present-day Indonesia). As the sole extant commercial play set in Maluku prior to the 1642 closure of London’s theatres, John Fletcher’s The Island Princess (ca. 1621) provides a valuable window into English ambitions and anxieties regarding these Southeast Asian islands, including on the envisioned religious implications of engaging with their inhabitants. Yet amidst the growing scholarship on this tragicomedy, Fletcher’s presentation of Malukan faith itself continues to defy ready interpretation. For rather than straightforwardly reproducing the existing discourse English dramatists used to stage Muslim communities, Fletcher evokes the islanders’ beliefs using a slippery amalgam of Islamic, ‘pagan’ and nature-worshipping motifs. This paper thus seeks to uncover the possible rationale for Fletcher’s puzzling portrayal of Malukan spirituality. Moving beyond travel accounts and Fletcher’s known sources, this paper uncovers the dramatist’s possible engagement with a range of other texts. It reveals the surprisingly local discursive influences shaping Fletcher’s global vision, showing how ongoing European religious tensions colour the play’s presentation of faith in these distant sultanates. In so doing, this paper seeks to extend critical understanding of the diverse approaches English dramatists took to staging Muslim powers beyond the Ottoman, Persian and Mughal empires, and to reveal the close connections linking English drama, Euro-Islamic commerce and Europe’s long Reformation.

Bio:

Emily Soon is a Lecturer of English Literature at the Singapore Management University and a member of the Medieval and Early Modern Orients (MEMOs) research team. Her research focuses on cross-cultural literary engagement between Asia and Europe in the premodern and modern eras, with a particular emphasis on Southeast Asia. Her current book project explores the role of religion in mediating early modern English literary engagement with the East Indies. Her research has been published in Modern Philology, Shakespeare Survey and England’s Asian Renaissance.

Dr Thomas Matthew Vozar (University of Florida), 'Isaac Barrow on the Turkish Religion: A Latin Poem about Islam from Ottoman Istanbul'

Abstract:

This talk introduces my volume forthcoming in the Bloomsbury Neo-Latin Series, Isaac Barrow on the Turkish Religion: A Latin Poem on Islam from Ottoman Istanbul. This book offers a novel perspective on Anglo-Islamic encounters by making accessible De Religione Turcica (‘On the Turkish Religion’), a Latin poem on Islam composed by the Cambridge scholar Isaac Barrow during a visit to Istanbul in 1658, which is newly edited here together with the first ever translation and commentary. 

As regius professor of Greek, the inaugural Lucasian professor of mathematics, and an early fellow of the Royal Society, the polymathic Barrow embodied the seventeenth-century ideal of general learning. He even taught a young Isaac Newton. But his excursion to the Ottoman Empire in the late 1650s, his amateur interest in oriental studies, and his skillful corpus of Latin verse have attracted exceedingly little notice until now. 

Drawing on the volume’s extensive introduction, my talk will discuss the context in which Barrow composed De Religione Turcica, including his Latin poetry and early interest in oriental studies at Cambridge, his travels to Izmir and Istanbul, and especially his encounter with the Polish-born Ottoman dragoman Ali Ufki, whose treatise entitled Epitome Fidei et Religionis Turcicae (on which I have written elsewhere) constitutes Barrow’s main source of information about Islam.The talk will also indicate some of the ways in which Barrow appropriated Ufki’s Epitome for his own polemical purposes in the poem.

Bio:

Thomas Matthew Vozar, a scholar of early modern literary and intellectual culture, is Assistant Professor of Humanities at the Hamilton Center for Classical and Civic Education, University of Florida. After studying Classics at Oberlin College and the University of Pennsylvania he completed his PhD in English at the University of Exeter and worked as an Excellence Strategy Postdoctoral Fellow in Early Modern Studies at the University of Hamburg. His books include Milton, Longinus, and the Sublime in the Seventeenth Century (Oxford University Press, 2023), winner of the Milton Society of America’s James Holly Hanford Book Award, and Isaac Barrow on the Turkish Religion: A Latin Poem on Islam from Ottoman Istanbul (Bloomsbury, forthcoming)

Dr Ataberk Cetinkaya (Middle East Technical University), 'The Rhetorical Framing of Islam in George Sandys’ A Relation of a Journey begun An. Dom. 1610'

Abstract:

In the first book of his travelogue, George Sandys (1578–1644) provides a detailed account of his travels through the Ottoman Empire, with a particular focus on Constantinople and Islamic history. His narrative reflects the prevalent anti-Islamic and Eurocentric attitudes of early modern England, yet it also reveals moments of interpretative engagement. Despite his preconceptions and biases, Sandys employs various strategies to navigate and frame his understanding of Islamic customs and history. Whenever he encounters cultural practices or religious doctrines he struggles to comprehend, he introduces doubt, subtly undermining their legitimacy. He draws upon classical sources to reinforce his judgments and frequently invokes ambiguous authorities through phrases such as ‘they say’ or ‘some say,’ constructing a narrative that oscillates between classical references and hearsay. At times, his own voice emerges through cautious qualifications like ‘perhaps’ and parenthetical insertions in which he directly expresses his interpretations. These rhetorical choices allow us to examine the act of interpretation itself. This study critically analyses the sections of A Relation of a Journey that concern Islam, exploring how Sandys constructs his narrative and the broader implications of his rhetorical style. By interrogating his textual strategies, this paper examines how his work reflects and perpetuates early modern European biases, framing Islam within a discourse of religious othering and political critique.

Bio:

Ataberk Çetinkaya graduated from the Department of American Culture and Literature at Hacettepe University, Türkiye in 2020. He earned his MA degree in English Literature from Middle East Technical University, Türkiye in 2023. The title of his MA thesis is “Auditory Relations: A Study of the Soundscapes in Virginia Woolf's The Years and Between the Acts”. He is currently a research assistant and a PhD candidate at Middle East Technical University. His research interests include psychoanalysis, modernist literature, and early modern literature.

Dr Gökhan Albayrak (Ankara University), Sema and Ney in the Diaries of John Covel: An English Clergyman’s Fascination and Scepticism towards the Whirling Dervishes

Abstract:

John Covel, a seventeenth-century Anglican clergyman and traveller, documented his encounters with the religious diversity of the Ottoman Empire in his diaries. His writings remain a crucial historical source, providing insight into European perceptions of religious pluralism in the Ottoman Empire and the broader dynamics of cross-cultural encounters in the seventeenth century. His writings offer a European perspective on Islam, Eastern Christianity, and Judaism, while also providing a rare firsthand account of the mystical practices of the Whirling Dervishes of the Mevlevi Order. Covel’s observations on Islam reveal a mixture of curiosity, respect, and misunderstanding, as he noted the discipline of Islamic prayer and the grandeur of Ottoman mosques while simultaneously approaching religious conversion with scepticism. His interactions with the Greek Orthodox Church reflect a tension between Anglican and Eastern Christian traditions, particularly regarding the veneration of icons and liturgical practices. However, it is his account of the Whirling Dervishes’ Sema – ceremonial dance - that stands out as a significant contribution to early European documentation of Sufi mysticism. Covel describes the ceremony in detail, noting the dervishes’ structured, trance-like whirling, the symbolic hand gestures, and the accompanying ecstatic music, particularly the ney - reed flute. While he recognized the discipline and devotion involved, his Anglican background led him to question the spiritual legitimacy of the practice, likening it to monastic mysticism yet viewing it with suspicion. This paper aims to explore how his descriptions reflect both fascination and scepticism, capturing the tensions of early modern interfaith encounters. 

Bio:

Gökhan Albayrak graduated from the Department of English Language and Literature at Hacettepe University in 2006. He earned his MA degree in 2009 and his PhD degree in 2019 in English Literature at Middle East Technical University. He has taught and studied at the State University of New York and the University of Brighton. He has published pieces on the long nineteenth century, Romantic and Victorian poetry, literary theory, psychoanalysis, feminism, queer theory, and affect studies. Currently he teaches as an assistant professor at the Department of English Language and Literature of Ankara University. 

Prof George Sanikidze (Ilia State University), 'The Religious Policy of Shah Abbas I and his Successors Towards: Armenians and Georgians'

Abstract:

The paper examines the key aspects of Safavid policy towards Armenian and Georgian Christians during the 17th century. The first part focuses on the relocation of Armenians and Georgians by Shah Abbas I during his campaigns in the Caucasus. The religious policies implemented by Shah Abbas differed between the two groups. Armenians, who played a crucial role in international trade for the Safavids, were permitted to maintain their Christian faith due to their close ties with European merchants, which aligned with the interests of the Safavid dynasty. In contrast, Georgians who served in the military and administration of the Safavids were required to convert to Islam. While Armenian villagers were able to preserve their faith, Georgians underwent Islamization. The paper further analyzes the causes and effects of Shah Abbas's anti-Orthodox policies.

In the second part of the paper, the distinct aspects of the Safavid religious policy towards Eastern Georgia are examined. Persia allowed to maintain the existing social and economic structure of Kartli, with the Georgian Bagrationi dynasty retaining the royal throne on the condition that they adopt Islam and submit to the authority of the Safavid shah. The part of the Georgian nobility was also Islamized but the absolute majority of the population remained Christian. Although Kartli was considered a velayet of the Safavid Empire, it functioned with a degree of autonomy greater than that of other provinces. This unique situation can be understood within the context of the asymmetric model of imperial organization.

Bio:

George Sanikidze is a Professor at Ilia State University, where he heads the Middle Eastern Studies program, and also serves as the Director of the G. Tsereteli Institute of Oriental Studies at the same university. His research covers the Medieval and Modern history of the Islamic world, the history and politics of Middle Eastern countries (notably Iran) and the Caucasus, as well as East-West interactions. He teaches various courses related to Middle East and Islamic studies at the Bachelor’s, Master’s, and Doctoral levels. George Sanikidze has worked as a visiting scholar at Paris-Sorbonne-III and IV Universities, the University of California-Berkeley, and the Universities of Hokkaido and Osaka in Japan. G. Sanikidze is the author of up to 100 academic publications, which have been published in Georgia, France, Japan, the USA, the UK, Holland, Spain, Turkey, Iran, Azerbaijan, Russia, and other countries. He has delivered papers at approximately 80 local and international academic conferences. George Sanikidze has received multiple grants and stipends, including a Fulbright stipend (USA), a Diderot Stipend (France), a grant from the Japan Foundation, and a stipend from Central European University.

Georgine Watson (University of Manchester), ‘New Political Landscape: The Florentine-Lebanese Mediterranean of the early seventeenth century'

Abstract:

The case study of the relationship between Emir Fakhr ad-Din al-Ma’n II and Cosimo II de Medici exemplifies a renewed interest in using diplomacy to remake established religious borderlands in the early seventeenth-century Mediterranean. The present paper proposes an in-depth archival investigation of the secret alliances between the Mount Lebanon Emirate and the Grand Duchy of Tuscany. I offer the opinion that Ottoman subjects pursued a desire to establish militarized commercial and diplomatic agreements with Christian territories throughout the early seventeenth century. Examination of a connection between the Mount Lebanon Emirate and Grand Ducal Tuscany heightens contemporary historiography’s understanding of seventeenth-century pan-Mediterranean relations. The present paper assembles archival material held within the John Rylands Library, Manchester, the Archivio di Stato di Firenze, and the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana via the Vatican Digital Library to further examine a connective approach to the geographical, social, and political spheres of the early modern Mediterranean. The relationship documented between Fakhr ad-Din al-Ma’n II and Cosimo II de Medici between 1609-1613 develops established narratives of Ottoman-European interaction through the expansion and reversal of Eurocentric opinions of militarized naval interaction with the Ottoman Empire. Examination of the Ottomancentric perspective held by the exiled Lebanese Emir Fakhr ad-Din al-Ma’n II when interpreting Ottoman-European relations within the Court of Grand Ducal Tuscany provides an enhanced understanding of the fragmented socio-political climate of the seventeenth-century

Mediterranean.

Bio:

As a final-year candidate on the University of Manchester’s PhD History Programme, my thesis War, Wealth and God's Will: The Order of Saint Stephen between Crusade and Commerce in the Late Sixteenth Century connects early modern Mediterranean trade, crusade and religious interaction between Grand Ducal Tuscany and the Ottoman Empire. I have a specific interest in the role of Christianity within commercial trading, the construction of European noble family’s identities within literary texts and portraiture, and the varied usage of private Military Orders to shape Renaissance community formation and aid foreign diplomacy throughout the early modern Mediterranean.

Timur Khan (Universiteit Leiden), 'European understandings of the Afghans before British colonial rule' 

Abstract:

Sustained European knowledge production about the Pashtuns, historically known as Afghans, began in the 19th century. It deepened after the East India Company’s conquest of large parts of the Pashtun homeland in 1849. This body of knowledge continues to inform Western, especially Anglo-American, ideas of the Pashtuns/Afghans.  

But there was knowledge produced by Europeans about Afghans since at least the late 16th century. Not created in the same context of colonial domination as in the 19th century, these representations are informed by various viewpoints. The imperial stance of the Mughal and Safavid regimes was one: hence many of these early European accounts treat the Afghans as rebellious, wild bandits. This certainly prefigures later attitudes. On the other hand, these authors brought their own vocabulary, experiences, and ideas to the table. They made connections with their own world, as in the Polish Jesuit Judasz Tadeusz Krusinski’s theory that the Afghans were originally Armenian Christians, or Joseph Tiefenthaler comparing the Pashto language to Spanish. Having experienced the shocking defeat of the Safavids in 1722, Krusinski saw the Afghans as an impressive and disciplined military force. Colonial knowledge speaks of primordial ‘tribes’ and ‘chiefs,’ but Niccolao Manucci and Antoni Monserrat used their own contemporary vocabulary of dukes and princes to express their leaders’ status, or even sovereignty, as part of Hindustan’s diverse elite. 

Returning to these early sources can help us rethink and historicize colonial stereotypes about the Afghans or Pashtuns, which are sometimes so prevalent as to feel inescapable.

Bio:

Timur Khan is a PhD candidate at the Leiden Institute for Area Studies. His project Beyond the Frontier examines how the local elite of the Peshawar Valley navigated the tumultuous period between around 1739 and 1900, and Peshawar’s changing place in the wider world throughout that final period of precolonial empires and the beginnings of British rule.

Dr Shazia Jagot (University of York), 'Astrolabe as archive and an archive of astrolabes: Chaucer’s astrolabe and its Islamic affordances'

Abstract:

What could be more striking than the circular, brass astrolabe with its delicate star-map webbing, its precise engravings, moveable rulers, and a ring to, as Chaucer tells his son Lewis, loop one’s thumb through? An object that takes in multiple senses asking the user to hold, feel, look drawing together artisanal aesthetics, astronomical mathematics, practical observation, language, and translation. Chaucer is, of course, taken by the astrolabe and in addition to his Treatise on the Astrolabe, the instrument appears in the Miller’s Tale, and is evoked in the Squire’s and Knight’s Tales. This paper explores the Islamic affordances of the astrolabe in Chaucer’s writings but with the aim of exploring the astrolabe as archive and an archive of astrolabes that both connects, and reorients, late medieval England with premodern Islamic ideas of objects, objectivity, and translation that emerge out of the material culture of scientific objects, i.e. the instruments themselves, Arabic scientific writings (genre of treatises on the astrolabe) as well Arabic and Persian literary writings. It asks how can we extend the rich connections that the astrolabe affords through material culture, mathematics, metaphor, technical language, to a theorisation of the object from Arabic, Persian to Latin, and Middle English? How might we build an archive of astrolabes or understand the astrolabe as archive? And what might this mean for understanding Chaucer’s fascination with this object?  

Bio:

Shazia Jagot is Senior Lecturer in Medieval and Global Literature at the University of York. She is currently completing a monograph on Chaucer’s Arabic ‘sources’ and works on a variety of connections, literary, material, scientific, across the premodern Islamic world and Britain. She is a former editor-in-chief for the journal postmedieval and a current editor for the book series Oxford Studies in Medieval Literature and Culture. 

Nicolas McKelvie (New York University), 'Reading the Text of Islamic Textiles in Medieval Romance: The Materiality of Ambivalent Orientalism in "The King of Tars"'

Abstract:

In the fourteenth-century English romance The King of Tars, a Muslim sultan transforms

from black to white when he converts to Christianity, posing an interpretative challenge for those who claim that notions of race in Europe did not develop until a later period. Recently, scholars such as Geraldine Heng and Cord Whitaker have argued that the sultan’s shifting skin color does, in fact, indicate early notions of race, while Sierra Lomuto claims that the character of the Princess of Tars represents an “exotic ally,” expressing Orientalist ideas about the Islamic world that were influenced by trade and diplomatic relationships with the Mongol Empire. However, a key component of The King of Tars that has been absent from this critical conversation is its fixation on rich textiles, which reflects the prominent presence in medieval Europe of fabrics produced in “the Orient,” often by Islamic cultures. Through an interdisciplinary examination of this system of exchange and the names used for Islamic textiles in both fiction and nonfictiontexts in late medieval England, this paper argues that the trade in material culture directly influenced the development of European Orientalism. Upon this backdrop, reading the textiles in The King of Tars as text reveals the cultural significance of Eastern silks in medieval England and demonstrates how the emergent English state used material culture to engage in a pan-Euro-Asian language of power and define itself against the religious and racial other.

Bio:

Nicolas McKelvie is a Master’s student in the English department at New York University. He earned his Bachelor’s degree in Secondary Education at the University of Vermont and his Master’s in Curriculum and Instruction at Boston College. His research interests include postcolonial and decolonial studies, the global Middle Ages, gender, and materiality. 

Dr Unita Ahdifard (Kwantlen Polytechnic University),'"The Pleasure of Knowing Things Remote”: William Daniel’s Travels from England to Surat'

Abstract:

By the time William Daniels published his 1702 travel text, A Journal Or Account of William Daniel, His Late Expedition Or Undertaking to Go from London to Surrat in India, his was certainly not the first journal to recount a voyage through the Islamic World to South Asia, whether as an East India Company agent or as a captive. However, while Daniel’s journey over land and sea draws from a lineage of scholars, missionaries, merchants, and enslaved individuals from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, his journal emphasizes a daring, adventurous tone that sets it apart from its contemporaries and predecessors often focused on duty and/or travail. From the beginning of his travels as a messenger for the East India Company, which take him through cities such as Cairo, Alexandria, and “Jenbo” (Yenbo, the port city near Medina), Daniel outlines the motives for his travel in language that articulates desire and a natural, embodied inclination for mobility. Whether narrating travel delays due to storms in Genoa, or a capture that turned into a visit to an Arabian “bawdy-house”, Daniel relays his account through his “humour” for travel and his “pleasure of knowing things remote,” which he describes as his “chiefest satisfaction.” This presentation will trace the threads of desire and pleasure in Daniel’s understudied travel text, and connect them to prior travel accounts, as well as future texts – both fictional and non-fictional – of the early-to-mid-eighteenth century.

Bio:

Unita Ahdifard researches early modern women’s writing, especially as it pertains to travel and mobility between England and the Persianate world. She completed her Ph.D. at the University of California, Santa Barbara, with a focus on early modern women’s travel narratives, and a postdoctoral research fellowship at the Center for 17th & 18th- Century Studies at the UCLA Clark Library. She is currently an instructor in the department of English at Kwantlen Polytechnic University. Unita’s forthcoming publication on Elizabeth Marsh will be published with Studies in Canadian Literature, in a special edition focused on Indian Ocean studies. 

William Perry (University College Dublin), 'The Possibilities of Encounter: Travel and Space in Early Modern English Accounts of Isfahan'

Abstract:

Thomas Herbert, Anthony Sherley and John Cartwright all travelled to Isfahan in the late 16th and early 17th centuries and produced personal travelogues about their experiences. This paper analyses their experiences in Isfahan, the then capital of Safavid Persia and their encounters in the city, identifying their knowledge and understanding of the cultural diversity present and the role that played in their descriptions of Persia as a whole. Sherley in particular, emphasises the roles of Caucasian minorities and their influence at the court of Shah Abbas, whose presence also provided the Englishman with Christian allies at the court. With its focus on the spaces inhabited by these travellers in Isfahan and the peoples they encounter and describe, this paper demonstrates that some early modern English travellers had a sophisticated understanding of the cultural diversity of Isfahan, which aided them to thrive in their diplomatic, mercantile, popular, and literary pursuits.

Bio:

William Perry is a PhD Candidate in the School of English, Drama and Film at University College Dublin. His research focuses on Early Modern Travel Writing and Safavi Iran. He is currently completing his thesis entitled Travel and Transculturality: Centring Isfahan in Early Modern Travel Writing and Drama. William previously matriculated from the Australian National University, with his thesis on Cultural Transmission in Early Modern English Drama, with a focus on dramatic portrayals of the Middle East and North Africa.

Dr Nia Deliana (Universitas Islam Internasional Indonesia), 'Sailing through Multipolar Waters: Archipelagic Actors in Forrest 1792 Account'

Abstract:

This paper revisits a Voyage from Calcutta to the Mergui Archipelago (1792) by Thomas Forrest, a Scottish-British East India Company officer and hydrographer, to examine how global agency in the eastern Indian Ocean archipelago was represented, mediated, and instrumentalized in the late eighteenth century. While Forrest is often studied for his contributions to maritime cartography and British imperial expansion, his narrative also provide a rich, if under analyzed, window into the political and commercial networks of Malay, Burmese, and other archipelagic actors who navigated the complex relationships with European powers. By foregrounding the concept of archipelagic agency, this paper argues that Forrest accounts, though framed within colonial discourse, unwittingly captures the multipolar and negotiated nature of sovereignty and diplomacy in the Indian Ocean world. Through critical reading of his encounters with local rulers, seafarers, and traders, the study repositions Southeast Asian maritime societies not as peripheral subjects but as active participants shaping regional order in an age of intensifying imperial competition. The paper contributes to ongoing historiographical effort to decenter Eurocentric narratives and to conceptualize the Indian Ocean as a space of layered sovereignties and relational diplomacy.

Bio:

Dr Nia Deliana earned a Ph.D. from the Faculty of Human Sciences, International Islamic University of Malaysia (IIUM). Her dissertation concentrates on precedent historical foreign relations between Indians and Indonesia. She has published on numerous issues. Her latest works include a chapter on the Rohingya during the Pandemic, in CoronAsur: Asian Religions in the Covidian Age (Univ. of Hawai’i Press) edited by Emily Zoe Hertzman, et all (2023). Her research interest includes Indonesia’s classical and contemporary foreign affairs across the Indian Ocean and Indonesia, multilateralism between South India and the Malay Peninsula, and the making of race, knowledge and identity politics. Currently, Dr. Deliana is working on a research project on the shape of international affairs across the Indian Oceans before the colonial period. She teaches methods and theories in politics and international relations in the faculty of social sciences at Indonesia International Islamic University, Depok, West Java.

Dr Eva Momtaz (University of Birmingham), Eve Between Fiction and Faith: Paradise Lost in the Hands of the Modern Muslimah

Abstract:

John Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667), is a renowned canonical work of English literature. By retelling the story of creation, the poet embarked on an epic journey to “justify the ways of God to men” (Book 1: l.26). As a result of the increasing numbers of individuals from BAME backgrounds entering UK higher education, the reach of Milton’s Paradise Lost has expanded. The poem speaks particularly profoundly to its Muslim readers, dramatizing as it does an origin story central to Islamic belief, though, of course, it deviates from the Qur’anic account. This paper uncovers how the epic poem is read and understood today by paying close attention to the reading experiences of Milton’s female Muslim readers. It will explore how such reading experiences are influenced and coloured by cultural and/or religious identities through an exploration of the characterisation of Milton’s Eve. Parallels will be drawn between the Quranic and Miltonic accounts of the first woman of humankind, to understand how a text which may be seen as dangerously heterodox yet at the same time reassuringly fictional, is perceived by modern British Muslimahs and informs their negotiation of religious, cultural, and social identity.

Bio:

Dr Eva Momtaz is a Research Fellow at the University of Birmingham, working on the Empathy, Narrative, and Cultural Values (ENCV) project. Her research explores how cultural values shape narrative engagement, particularly in education and health. Her previousproject, Milton and the Modern Muslimah: Paradise Lost and British South Asian Muslim Women Readers, examined how British South Asian Muslim women interpret Paradise Lost, revealing how cultural and religious identities shape literary reception. She also investigated how Milton’s epic is taught in UK higher education, engaging with tutors to explore pedagogical approaches in diverse classrooms. She is currently developing this research into a monograph.

Eva has taught Milton at both university and sixth-form levels across several UK institutions. While her current fellowship is research-focused, she remains committed to inclusive teaching and curriculum development. She is also actively involved in outreach work for BAME communities, advocating for greater inclusivity in research and education.

Emma Sacco (University of Cape Town) and Thalén Rogers (Univeristy of Cape Town), 'Surviving Textualization: The Pedagogic Radicalisation in South Africa through One Thousand and One Nights'

Abstract:

In South Africa, the Eurocentric model of academia continues to monopolise literary education in universities. Despite continuing protests against the neocolonialisation of knowledge and consequent changes to the texts covered by literature courses in South African universities, little has been done to rethink our frameworks for analysing and interpreting texts that rely on British and American modes of reading. This presents a fundamental failure to reform academia, particularly literary studies. A shift in both the texts studied and reading modes taught in South Africa is needed to reintegrate indigenous literature and storytelling traditions into South African

academia.

In 2024, the UCT English Department introduced Hanan Al Shayk’s retelling of One Thousand and One Nights into the first-year course at the University of Cape Town. This addition has begun to challenge the university’s reliance on neocolonial methods and radicalise literary studies at a university level in South Africa. As an integrative and collaborative text shaped by premodern Islamic modes of storytelling, the collection suggests distinctly anti-neocolonial modes of analysis and interpretation for literary studies. In particular, the retelling by Al-Shāykh in both the short story collection and play versions foregrounds the collection’s basis in premodern storytelling traditions to challenge its textualisation and translation for a European audience. This paper explores One Thousand One Nights’ potential to radicalise the study of texts from the global South in university settings by encouraging students to engage with African and Islamic storytelling.

Bio:

Emma Sacco is a Master’s student in English Literary Studies at the University of Cape Town. Currently in her second year of Master’s, her research interests are in South African poetry, specifically poetry written by South African women and queer writers, and poetry of witness. Her Master’s dissertation is focused on the debut poetry collection of South African poet, Maneo Mohale. Emma is also a tutor in the English department at UCT, currently working with lecturers to teach and hone the academic skills of first-year students. Before working at UCT, Emma interned at PEN South Africa in 2022 and worked as a publishing assistant at Electric Book

Works from 2023 to 2024.

Thalén Rogers has just submitted his Master’s dissertation at the University of Cape Town. His dissertation uses the concept of the palimpsest to theorise Zoë Wicomb’s presentation of South African histories in her novels David’s Story and Still Life and argues for the potential of postcolonial fiction to rehabilitate history by including the numerous voices of the past, especially those erased by white supremacist and other hegemonic narratives of history. His research interests include postcolonial and creole literatures, especially in their engagement with the ruptures and disjunctions of the present geopolitical situation in relation to past oppression and erasures. He teaches high school English and tutors in the Department of English Literary Studies at UCT.

Caroline Fleischauer (University of the Free State), 'Difference, Ignorance, and Teaching Beyond Dichotomy: Methods for Examining Islam as the “Dark Foil” to Christianity in The Song of Roland'

Abstract:

Charlemagne’s Christian army versus that of Marsile, the leader of the Arab Muslim forces in Spain in the final chapter of a seven-year crusade: so sets the stage for The Song of Roland (c. 1100). And yet while the famed chanson de geste does historically little to accurately represent Medieval Islam or its people, it does provide insight into how medieval Christians viewed their adversaries. Yet while this poem is often used as an example of “othering” of Muslims by Christians, I argue that this poem perhaps recognizes, if not identification of similar values, than filling in the unknown about Islam with related Christian practices and ideologies. Roland, then, constructs the Spanish Muslims as a foil to the Frankish Christians, albeit a dark one, thus establishing a sort of begrudging equity that resists the oversimplification of the poem as merely a “clash of cultures.” Approaching the poem from this angle changes the way it can be interpreted and taught, particularly in a modern era which tends to demonize difference. In this paper, I will discuss the depictions of both Muslims and Christians in The Song of Roland, and, guided by Dr. Antonio A. Garcia’s article, “In the Shadow of a Mosque: Mapping the ‘Song of Roland’,” present ways of teaching the narrative epic poem in a manner connecting it to students lives and understanding of difference in the modern world.  

Bio:

Caroline Fleischauer has an M.A. in Literature from the University of Wyoming where her research focused on power and gender in medieval and early modern texts. She is currently pursuing an M.Ed. in Literacy and Second Language Studies through the University of Cincinnati where she hopes to connect her medieval interest with current understandings of literacy and second language studies. An English Language Fellow, Fleischauer teaches in the Academic Literacy and Languages Department at the University of the Free State in Bloemfontein, South Africa.

Dr Önder Çakırtaş (Bingöl University), 'Matter and Meaning: Objects, Race, and Islam in Richard Twyman’s Othello'

Abstract:

Dr Önder Çakırtaş’ paper will examine the symbolic and cultural significance of objects in Richard Twyman’s 2017 production of Othello, emphasizing their racial and Islamic connotations within a contemporary context. By analysing key material elements—such as the handkerchief, the prayer rug, veil and weapons—this paper explores how these objects function as markers of cultural identity, religious affiliation, and racialized power structures. The handkerchief, reinterpreted in Twyman’s staging, evokes themes of purity, betrayal, and the surveillance of Black masculinity, while the prayer rug highlights Othello’s Muslim heritage, situating his alienation within the broader discourse of Islamophobia and Western anxieties about religious difference. Drawing on theories of material culture, race, and postcolonialism, this study demonstrates how Twyman’s production reconfigures objects to critique contemporary racial and religious prejudices. Ultimately, this analysis reveals the complex interplay between matter and meaning in the adaptation, illustrating how material objects become instruments of ideological and psychological expression in modern reinterpretations of Othello.

Bio:

Dr Önder Çakırtaş, an Associate Professor at Bingöl University, specializes in Modern and Contemporary British Drama and Literature, with a focus on Political, Minority, Ethnic, Race-Oriented, and Disability Theatre. He completed his PhD on Victorian Bernard Shaw and was a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at the University of Roehampton in London. Currently authoring Staging Muslims in Britain (Routledge), he has published extensively, including Ten ve Kimlik: Çağdaş Siyahi İngiliz Tiyatrosu (2020) and Language, Power and Ideology in Political Writing (2019). He serves as founding editor of Essence & Critique: Journal of Literature and Drama Studies, and is involved with Performing Ethos: International Journal of Ethics in Theatre & Performance. Additionally, he founded the Turkish Society for Theatre Research in 2021. Çakırtaş teaches Renaissance Literature, Shakespeare, English Theatre, and Contemporary British Theatre, including an MA course on 20th Century British Literature.

Dr Aisha Hussain (University of Salford), '“These moors are unchangeable in their wills” (Othello, I.iii): Reframing the Racialization of Islam and Muslims in Ola Ince’s Othello' (2024)

Abstract:

Dr Aisha Hussain will discuss Ola Ince’s recent production of Shakespeare’s Othello at the Globe Theatre (2024) represents Shakespeare’s Moorish male figure in opposition to the Orientalist stereotype endorsed by crusading discourses where sexual incontinence often parallels with political tyranny (see Orr, 2001; see Manion, 2014). This production incorporates the character of Othello into twenty-first century English culture, evident in scenes where the Venetian army becomes the London Metropolitan police and Cyprus becomes the Docklands. Ince’s production relies upon modernised simulations suggestive of how more nuanced representations of Sub-Saharan Africans on early modern stages are linked to a more refined understanding of Ottoman law (which emerged in the Maghreb in 1516), and how it often ‘justified’ violence as a necessary requisite for socio-political success. Ince’s production also utilises this historical understanding to communicate the nuances of hierarchy and racially/religiously motivated social issues as they (are) affect(ed by) the contemporary police force to her twenty-first century audience.

Bio:

Dr Aisha Hussain completed her PhD at the University of Salford. Her research interests include Turkish Otherness, fictional terror, Anglo-Ottoman commerce, gender studies, Orientalism, and, in particular, crusading and anti-crusading discourses in early modern English drama. She holds a Bachelor of Arts in English and Drama (University of Salford, 2017) and a Master of Arts in Renaissance English Literature (University of Leeds, 2018). Aisha was awarded the Pathways to Excellence Studentship by the University of Salford upon commencing her PhD studies in September 2018. Her current research investigates how the emergence of a more positive theatrical Turkish type in the works of Fulke Greville, Thomas Goffe and Roger Boyle reflects, in a shift from their contemporaries, what can be considered an anti-crusading discourse.

Dr Hassana Moosa (University of Cape Town), 'Hiren the Fair Greek, Othello, and Racial Slavery on the Early Modern English Stage'

Chandini Jaswal (Independent), 'Revisiting the Mughal Zenana— As It Was: Challenging the Narrative of the Space of the Mughal Harem by Analysing Visual and Material Culture'

Abstract:

“Their mahals [harem] are adorned internally with lascivious sensuality, wanton and reckless festivity, superfluous pomp, inflated pride, and ornamental daintiness..”

– Francesco Pelseart, a Dutch Merchant in Seventeenth-Century Mughal India on the women of the Empire He Never Saw

The history of India will always be synonymous with the greatness of the Mughals. While

plenty has been written on the lives of the great Mughal emperors, the representation of the

harem (زﻧﺎﻧﮫ / ‘Zenana’), the women in the lives of the Emperors, has been scarce andtitillating. One of the few contemporary accounts to mention royal women explicitly, theEuropean Travels, present an acutely promiscuous account — leading to the association ofthe harem with immorality in modern thought. The court chronicles, on the other hand,largely ignore the women — referring to them only by their grand, maternal titles. Ultimately, women of the Mughal women have been “otherised” not just by foreign but even local accounts. By analysing paintings, portraitures and architectural patronage of the inmates of the Mughal harem, this paper seeks to understand the ‘myth of the harem’ as well as ‘demythologise’ it. Whilst the depiction of begums and princesses in paintings is not as vast as that of the Emperors and princes, a close analysis reveals how paintings became a medium to depict the complex hierarchies of the harem as well as a silent acknowledgement of their contributions.

Keywords: Mughals — harem — myth — veiled history 

Bio:

Chandini Jaswal is a second-year law student at the Panjab University, India. She also holds a masters degree in history and secured a gold medal in her undergraduate history degree. Jaswal is a core team member at Karwaan Heritage, India and a communication member at The Museum of British Colonialism, UK-Kenya. Her research interest focuses on subcontinental history, particularly women’s studies in pre-modern India through histories of art. She has presented her research at conferences such as the Association for Persianate Studies Graduate Student Conference at Princeton University and the Islamic Art History Research Workshop at the University of York. Jaswal was awarded the 2025 Postgraduate Bursary for her research in the Mughals by the British Society for Eighteenth Century Studies. Furthermore, she is engaged in documenting oral histories of the 1947 Partition.

Niyanta Sangal (University of Maryland), 'Tracing Gendered Third Spaces in Dryden's Aureng-zebe through Mughal Art'

Abstract:

Dyden’s Aureng-zebe appropriates early modern travel accounts circulating in Early Modern England from Mughal India to portray an orientalist gender embodiment through its various characters. My presentation will explore the play as an appropriation that relies on various sources including representations of Mughal art to further this gender variance. I will particularly trace the iconography of Nur Jahan’s cross-dressing as a potentially varied gendered third space that Dryden utilizes to cast Nourmahal, a derivation of Nur Jahan, as a masculine or a bestial figure.

Bio:

Niyanta Sangal is a PhD Student at University of Maryland, College Park. Her research interests are adaptation studies, film studies, gender and race in Early Modern Drama and travelogues along with Global Renaissance. She is particularly keen on exploring gender variance in Mughal empire and does comparative research with Mughal and English texts. Her work explores both contemporary adaptations and historical representations of India in Early Modern English literature.

Kirsten Vitale Engel (University of Connecticut), 'Performing Monarchy through Magnificence'

Abstract:

The study will emphasize moments of the spectacular; daily rituals, courtly entertainment, and large-scale political ceremonies will be surveyed to examine a monarch's presentation at large, and in particular, the role of magnificence in varying aspects of court life. Magnificence underpinned the rites, rituals, and ceremonies of early modern monarchical culture. Displays of greatness and beauty through actions and objects enabled rulers to communicate and perform notions of sovereignty, power, and legitimacy. The work will include a case study comparing Henry VIII of England, Suleiman I of the Ottoman Empire, and Babur of the Mughal Empire, three rulers who performed monarchy through the unifying concept of magnificence. Such comparisons will shed light on how presentations of monarchy were constructed, or reconstructed, through major political transitions from kingship to empire. Emphasis will be placed on cross-cultural interactions in the performances of monarchy. How was monarchical magnificence presented as a Padishah versus a Sultan versus a King? In what ways did the Padishah construct his monarchical performance based on Indo-Persian cultural customs? How did the cultural melting pot of the Ottoman Empire, which included Byzantine, Persian, and Turkish influences, affect the Sultan’s public persona? In turn, how did long-standing traditions of European kingship influence that of the second Tudor King? The case study will consider how themes of gender and religion contributed to such cross-cultural interactions. This work will focus on masculinity in magnificence, yet it is beneficial to examine the role of the Sultana(s) and Queen(s) in such performances. How did femininity affect the overall presentation of magnificence? Was there a specific emphasis on female luxury in terms of dress, jewelry, cloth, and so on that aided in presenting the ideal to the court and the broader public? Through such queries, the study will explore the vast significance of global interactions in the evolution and construction of monarchical culture in the early modern world.

Bio:

Kristen is a Ph.D. candidate in Early Modern European History at the University of Connecticut, USA. Her research focuses on early Henrician spectacle, court culture, and performative politics in the early Tudor state. Her dissertation examines a transformation in the uses of spectacle and analyzes the relationship among courtly cultural preferences, their corresponding depictions, and efforts to actualize those depictions as political propaganda.She is currently Editor-in-Chief of the "The Court Observer" for The Society for Court Studies and Submissions Editor for the Royal Studies Journal.