Spotlight Detail

Sheiba Kaufman Awarded Clark Library Postdoc

Sheiba Kian Kaufman, a PhD candidate in the UCI English Department, has received a prestigious Ahmanson-Getty Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Clark Library for 2016-2017. Sheiba will continue her work on English representations of Persia in early modern and Shakespearean drama.

English PhD candidate Sheiba Kian Kaufman has received a prestigious Ahmanson-Getty Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Clark Library for 2016-2017. She will participate in the Clark Core Program, "Entertaining the Idea: Shakespeare between Performance and Philosophy." The theme-based resident fellowship program, established with the support of the Ahmanson Foundation and the J. Paul Getty Trust, is designed to promote the participation of junior scholars in the Center’s yearlong core program. The William Andrews Clark Memorial Library is one of UCLA's major libraries for rare books and manuscripts, with particular strengths in English literature and history (1641-1800), Oscar Wilde, and fine printing.

Sheiba will also continue her work on Renaissance drama and Persian cosmopolitanism. The Hospitable Globe: Persia and the Early Modern English Stage examines how English representations of Persia present models of interreligious and intercultural hospitality for early modern and Shakespearean drama. Rather than staging an antagonistic, non-Christian foe, English playwrights depict Persia and its legendary monarchs, such as Cyrus the Great, as alternative spaces and figures of cosmopolitanism in the period. By focusing on a group of Persian themed plays staged between 1561-1696 in conversation with Shakespeare’s works, European peace proposals, and theories and practices of hospitality, this project reconstructs a more hospitable form of global relationships in the early modern period by contending that cross-cultural exchange, then and now, is not limited to models of conflict, contest, and domination.