Please join us for this book launch featuring Sheiba Kian Kaufman, who received her Ph.D. from UC Irvine in 2016. She is now a tenured professor of English at Saddleback College.
Sheiba's first book, Persian Paradigms in Early Modern Literature: Hospitable Globalities, published by Oxford University Press in 2025, examines how representations of Persia present models of intercultural hospitality for early modern English and Shakespearean drama. 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 an archive of Persian-themed plays staged between 1561 and1696 in conversation with Shakespeare’s works, European peace proposals, and contemporary theories and practices of hospitality, this project reconstructs the capacities called upon to imagine hospitable constellations of global relationships.
Read more about Sheiba's work on her website, Hospitable Globe.
RSVP information forthcoming.
This event is cosponsored by the Jordan Center for Persian Studies.