Zainab Cheema

Dr. Zainab Cheema is Assistant Professor of Early World Literature at Florida Gulf Coast University. Her teaching and research focus on contact zones in early globalizations, early modern race studies, translation movements, Anglo-Iberian cultural exchanges in early modern theatre, and contemporary film and television adaptations of medieval and early modern literature. Zainab is a member of the #ShakeRace and #RaceB4Race scholarly communities, as well as the Borderlands Shakespeare Colectiva. Zainab’s work has been supported by fellowships from the Fulbright Scholarship Program, the Folger Shakespeare Library, the Newberry Library, and the Huntington Library. She is currently working on her first book monograph supported by a Folger Long Term Fellowship for 2024-2025. 

In her recent work, she has explored racial queenship and Anglo-Spanish embassies in Shakespeare’s romances; the translation of immigration and exile from the novels of Cervantes onto the early modern English stage; intersections of Morisco and Black slaveries in the plays of Lope de Vega; the intersections of early modern race with #BlackLivesMatter and #MeToo in Starz’s adaptation of Shakespeare’s history plays for popular television; and representations of disability and caste in Vishal Bhardwaj’s Shakespeare trilogy. Zainab has been published in English Language Notes, Shakespeare Survey, Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation, Feminist Studies, The Bulletin of the Comediantes, The Shakespeare International Yearbook and other publications.