Rate My Professor Abdulhamit Arvas

Abdulhamit Arvas is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania, with affiliations in Gender, Sexuality and Women's Studies, Comparative Literature and Literary Theory, the Middle East Center, Theater Arts, and Global Medieval and Renaissance Studies. He earned his BA from Hacettepe University in Turkey, MA from Eastern Michigan University, and PhD in English with additional specialization in Women’s and Gender Studies from Michigan State University. Before joining Penn, Arvas served as Assistant Professor of Theater at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Shakespeare in Drama at Vassar College. He is an extraordinary member of Exeter College at the University of Oxford. His research and teaching center on early modern literature and culture, comparative histories of sexuality and race, queer studies, trans history, cross-cultural encounters, and Islam in the Renaissance.

Arvas authored Boys Abducted: The Homoerotics of Empire and Race in Early Modernity (Duke University Press, 2025), which won the 2026 Phyllis Goodhart Gordan Book Prize from the Renaissance Society of America and the 2026 First Book Award from the Shakespeare Association of America. He co-edited Critical Confessions Now, the tenth anniversary issue of postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies (2020), reissued as a book by Palgrave Macmillan (2023). His publications include articles in English Literary Renaissance (2021), Journal of Early Modern Cultural Studies (2020), GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies (2017), Shakespeare Survey (2015), and chapters in The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Race (2024), Trans Historical: Gender Plurality Before the Modern (2021), and The Cambridge History of Gay and Lesbian Literature (2014). He has received the 2025 Charles Ludwig Distinguished Teaching Award, 2025 and 2022 David Delaura Teaching Awards, Fulbright Fellowship, Folger Shakespeare Library Fellowship, SSHRC Early Modern Conversions grant at the University of Cambridge, University of Oxford Fellowship, and University of California Humanities Research Institute Fellowship. Currently, Arvas is preparing an introduction for a new edition of Shakespeare's Othello (Oxford University Press) and a second monograph, The Grammar of the Other: Translation and the (Un)Making of Gender, Sexual, and Racial Difference. His scholarship illuminates the global intersections of empire, race, gender, and sexuality in early modern texts.