Mira Kafantaris

Mira 'Assaf ميرا عساف  is an Assistant Professor of English and Race, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Butler University, specializing in Premodern Critical Race Studies, Shakespeare, and Early Modern Culture. She earned her Ph.D. in English from The Ohio State University, her M.A. in English from the American University of Beirut, and her B.A. in English Literature and Language from the Lebanese University. Her trans-historical and cross-disciplinary research explores the intersections of race-making with the politics of royal marriage, foreign queens, and border-crossing in the early modern period and in our current historical moment. 

'Assaf is completing her first open-access manuscript, titled Royal Marriage, Foreign Queens, and Constructions of Race in Early Modern England, which is under contract with the Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies Press and will be published in 2026. She was a 2023-2024 Folger Shakespeare Library Long-Term fellow.

With Sonja Drimmer and Treva B. Lindsey, she co-edited an open-access special issue of the Barnard Center for Research on Women’s journal, The Scholar and Feminist Online, titled “Race-ing Queens.” Her book chapters have appeared in Race and/as Affect; The Palgrave Handbook of Shakespeare’s Queens; and The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Ben Jonson (with Richard Dutton).  A new commissioned article on the mobility of racialized foreign queens is forthcoming in The Oxford Handbook of Travel, Identity, and Race in Early Modern England, edited by Nandini Das. Her current work includes an open-access edited collection (with Urvashi Chakravarty) on early modern queenship, premodern critical race studies, and queer theory, Race/Queer/Queens. The volume will be published in 2026 by the Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies Press 

For the Oxford World Series, she is writing the critical introduction to Antony and Cleopatra.

Her public humanities essays have appeared in several online publications, including the Folger Shakespeare Library's Collation, Shakespeare Globe,  The Sundial, The Millions, Overland Journal, The Rambling, The Conversation, Medium-Equity, and The Platform.

'Assaf currently serves as Early Modern Section Editor for The Sundial.  In 2023-2024, she served on the Program Committee for the Shakespeare Association of America. Her work has been supported by generous grants and fellowships from The Folger Shakespeare Library, The Shakespeare Association of America, The Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies (ACMRS), The Renaissance Society of America, Butler Awards Committee Faculty Research Grant, The Women’s Place at The Ohio State University, The Muslim Studies Endowment (Butler), and NEH/Frederic M. Ayres Fund (Butler).

At Butler, 'Assaf teaches courses on Shakespeare, early British literature, premodern critical race studies, women, gender, sexuality and trans* studies, and in the Core Curriculum. She regularly and enthusiastically mentors graduate and honors students. 

Past Awards:

2021-22: Folger Shakespeare Library and Society for the Study of Early Women and Gender Margaret Hannay Fellow.

2021: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies Short-Term Fellow.

2013-2014: Ohio State University Presidential Fellowship