Projects

Sir Jonathan Bate is an international leader in green thinking and applied humanities, with scholarly expertise in sustainability as well as in Shakespeare and Renaissance literature, Romanticism, biography and life-writing, contemporary poetry, visual culture and theater history. In 2015, he became the youngest person ever to have been knighted for services to literary scholarship.

Sarah Ellis is the director of Co-Star National Lab at Royal Holloway, University of London. Ellis is a leader with extensive experience in immersive storytelling, audience engagement and creative technology. Ellis is a member of DCMS' College of Experts, is a Principle Investigator for an AHRC funded Future of Performance Institute feasibility study and is an Industry Champion for the Creative Industries Policy and Evidence Centre in the UK.

Ruben Espinosa is a professor of English at Arizona State University and Director of the Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies. He is the author of Shakespeare on the Shades of Racism, among other titles. He is currently writing a book that examines how perceptions of legitimacy for U.S. Latinxs often influence the barriers and bridges that define the intersections between Shakespeare and Chicanx culture.

Peter Kirwan is a professor and co-director in Shakespeare and Performance at Mary Baldwin College. He works widely on the textual, theatrical, and filmic history of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. His monographs include Shakespeare in the Theatre: Cheek by Jowl and Shakespeare and the Idea of Apocrypha.

Navid Khonsari is the co-founder and CEO of iNK Stories. Passionate about ushering in the next evolution of narrative action adventure games  Khonsari is known for developing the cinematic look and feel for many video games franchises including: Grand Theft Auto/Vice City/San Andreas, Max Payne, Red Dead Revolver, Alan Wake, Resident Evil 7 and more.

Vassiliki Khonsari is a Creative Producer/Director/Writer and co-founder at iNK Stories. With a background as a visual anthropologist, Vassiliki's documentary work has been broadcast in more than 20 countries and on Netflix, ESPN, Sundance Channel, Discovery, TLC, MTV and more.

Leah Newsom is a fiction writer, playwright, and screenwriter. Her work has appeared in Conjunctions, Ninth Letter, Daedalus: The Journal of the Academy of Arts and Sciences, and more, and has been generously supported by the Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing, Tin House, and the National Parks Arts Foundation. 

Samantha Soule is an actor and writer. She is known for her role in the Netflix series Godless, as well as Nurse Jackie, The Blacklist, The Queen's Gambit and more. She co-wrote, directed, and starred in the award-winning film Midday Black Midnight Blue.

Ayanna Thompson is a scholar of Shakespeare, race and performance. She has supported major theatrical productions as a textual consultant, dramaturg, and casting consultant, including the recent Hamlet Hail to the Thief with Radiohead and Romeo and Juliet starring Kit Connor and Rachel Zegler. 

Miguel Aguilera is an associate professor of religious studies at Arizona State University. His scholarship concentrates on religion, sociocultural anthropology, ethnography, material culture, and archaeology focusing on Indigenous American cosmologies past to present. He specializes in Mesoamerican cosmovisions and their historical traditions, that is, pre-Columbian, colonial, and contemporary. 

Leslie M. Alexander is the Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Professor of History at Rutgers University. A specialist in early African American and African Diaspora history, she is the author of African or American? Black Identity and Political Activism in New York City, 1784-1861, Fear of a Black Republic: Haiti and the Birth of Black Internationalism in the United States, and is the co-editor of three additional volumes. Her current research examines how surveillance of free and enslaved Black communities in the colonial and antebellum eras laid the foundation for modern-day policing. 

Ambereen Dadabhoy is an associate professor of literature at Harvey Mudd College in California. Her work focuses on the strategies and mechanisms through which different cultures encounter, accommodate, and (often) conflict with each other. Within such negotiations, her teaching and research pursues lines of inquiry directed at uncovering culturally fraught representations of difference, which include gender, race, and religion.

Chouki El Hamel is a professor of history in the School of Historical, Philosophical and Religious Studies at Arizona State University, specializing in West and Northwest Africa. His training and doctoral studies were at the University of Sorbonne. He was a scholar in residence at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in New York City. In the year 2017, he was awarded a Fulbright grant for research in Morocco. He is an Africanist scholar who is particularly interested in the subaltern relationship of servile and marginalized communities to Islamic ruling institutions. His research into these relationships revolves around issues of slavery, race/ethnicity/color, gender, power/class, and restorative justice.  

Dan-el Padilla Peralta is a professor of Classics at Arizona State University. He is the author of many books, including Undocumented: A Dominican Boy’s Odyssey from a Homeless Shelter to the Ivy League (Penguin, 2016), Divine Institutions: Religions and Community in the Middle Roman Republic (Princeton, 2020), and Classicism and Other Phobias (Princeton, 2025). He has written for The Guardian, Matter, Vox, The New York Times, Fabulist, diaphanes and Public Books, and he was profiled in The New York Times Magazine in 2021.

Ayanna Thompson is a Regents Professor of English at Arizona State University, and the Executive Director of the Culture Foundry. She is the author of many books, including Blackface (Bloomsbury, 2021) and Shakespeare in the Theatre: Peter Sellars (Arden Bloomsbury, 2018). In 2021, she was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Thompson serves as a Shakespeare Scholar in Residence at The Public Theater in New York, and currently serves on the boards of the Royal Shakespeare Company, the Folger Shakespeare Library, the National Parks Arts Foundation, and Play On Shakespeare. She is a past-President of the Shakespeare Association of America. 

Cord J. Whitaker is an associate professor in the Department of English and Creative Writing at Wellesley, where he teaches courses on a wide variety of medieval subjects such as Chaucer, medieval romance, the historical development of race, the interactions of race and medievalism in modernity, to name a few, as well as the modern afterlives of these authors, texts, and developments. In October 2019, he published Black Metaphors: How Modern Racism Emerged from Medieval Race-Thinking, and he is hard at work on another, to be titled The Harlem Middle Ages: Color, Time, and Harlem Renaissance Medievalism.