About

Abdulhamit Arvas is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania with affiliations in Gender, Sexuality and Women's Studies, Comparative Literature & Literary Theory, the Middle East Center, Theater Arts, and Global Medieval and Renaissance Studies. His research and teaching concern early modern literature and culture, comparative histories of sexuality and race, queer studies, trans history, cross-cultural encounters, and Islam in the Renaissance. He is the author of Boys Abducted: The Homoerotics of Empire and Race in Early Modernity (Duke UP, 2025), which received the 2026 Phyllis Goodhart Gordan Book Prize for the Best Book in Renaissance Studies awarded by the Renaissance Society of America, as well as the 2026 First Book Award by the Shakespeare Association of America. His work explores early modern sexuality, gender, and race within a transcultural context, focusing on English and Ottoman literatures and the circulation of male adolescents as part of imperial politics in the Mediterranean during the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. His scholarship examines the tensions between aestheticized eroticism and violent histories of abductions, conversions, and enslavements, revealing relationships among homoeroticism, race, and empire in the early modern period. In addition to his book, he has co-edited a journal issue and is working on an introduction to a new edition of Shakespeare's Othello, as well as a second monograph titled The Grammar of the Other: Translation and the (Un)Making of Gender, Sexual, and Racial Difference. His publications have appeared in various academic journals and edited collections, and he has been awarded fellowships and grants from institutions including Fulbright, the Folger Shakespeare Library, SSHRC, the University of Oxford, and the University of California Humanities Research Institute. Prior to his current position, he held roles at the University of California Santa Barbara and Vassar College, and he earned his BA from Hacettepe University in Turkey, an MA from Eastern Michigan University, and a PhD in English from Michigan State University.

Research topics

• Art
• History
• Literature
• Political Science
• Sociology
• Law
• Gender studies
• Archaeology
• Aesthetics
• Ancient history
• Psychology
• Classics
• Philosophy

Selected publications

• Racialized Genders on the Shakespearean Stage

  Oxford University Press eBooks · 2024-01-23

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract This chapter discusses race and trans, as well as sexuality and class, as inevitable and inseparable components of embodiment, hence crucially intersecting components of Shakespearean drama in performance, research, pedagogy, and performance, be it on stage or in the classroom. By discussing the intersection of gender, sexuality, and race studies, this chapter proposes to examine genders in variance rather than dichotomous cis-centric assumptions, to consider gender variance as inextricably interlinked with—and articulated through—the infrastructures of racialized and eroticized power hierarchies, and to think such structures projected on the embodiment in a global, cross-cultural context. Finally, this chapter discusses the potentiality of intersectional analysis in a classroom setting.

  PublisherDOI

• Critical Confessions Now

  2022

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Psychology

  Deploys a wide array of critical approaches and narrative voices to address different linguistic and cultural contexts in different periods.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Critical confessions now

  2022 · 2 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • History
  • Aesthetics
  • Art
  PublisherDOI

• Performing and Desiring Gender Variance in the Early Modern Ottoman Empire

  Cornell University Press eBooks · 2021 · 2 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Political Science
  • History

  This chapter discusses performing and desiring gender variance in the early modern Ottoman Empire. Popular Ottoman poet Enderunlu Fazil is known for cataloging famous androgynous dancers of late eighteenth-century Istanbul in his Çenginame. The chapter notes the various transfigurations of köçek as a distinct gender category in urban settings in both Fazil's narrative and its early modern precedents. Köçek refers to young dancers assigned male at birth trained to perform for an exclusively male audience in feminine attires. Within the imperial hierarchy, permissible and disallowed forms of gender expression were accordingly determined by religion and imperial status. The köçek history challenges modern transphobia in today's Turkey and other Islamicate contexts.

  PublisherDOI

• 7. Performing and Desiring Gender Variance in the Early Modern Ottoman Empire

  Cornell University Press eBooks · 2021-11-04 · 2 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• 1 The Ottomans in and of Europe

  University of Delaware Press eBooks · 2021-12-17

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Critical confessions now

  postmedieval a journal of medieval cultural studies · 2020-08-01 · 5 citations

  editorialOpen access1st author
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Leander in the Ottoman Mediterranean: The Homoerotics of Abduction in the Global Renaissance

  English Literary Renaissance · 2020 · 6 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Literature
  • History
  • Art

  This essay revisits Leander’s abduction in the Hellespont with a focus on the geopolitical significations in Marlowe’s Hero and Leander. The imagery of the abducted boy, often recast as the iconic Ganymede, as object of desire is prevalent in early modern literature. Tracing representations of the abducted boy within the historical context of abductions in the Ottoman Mediterranean, the essay argues that the abducted boy is not just a classical prototype from a Greco-Roman lineage, but is also a reflection of the boys actually abducted in the early modern period, especially the boys who were objects of cross-cultural circulations generated by imperial hierarchies in the greater Mediterranean space. In his addition of a homoerotic abduction plot to the classical story from Musaeus and Ovid, Marlowe deploys the figure of Ganymede as well as a rhetoric of Mediterranean trade to imprint on Leander’s body an erotic-cultural history of abducted boys. Pursuing Leander in the Mediterranean waters and thus traveling between English and Ottoman contexts, this essay offers a relational reading strategy in exploring sexual, racial, and imperial components of literary and historical abductions in a global context. This approach ultimately reveals a connected history of homoerotic desire and imperial violence between English and Ottoman cultures in the global Renaissance. [A.A.]

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• <i>Mihri Hatun: Performance, Gender Bending, and Subversion in Ottoman Intellectual History</i>. Didem Havlioğlu.

  Early Modern Women An Interdisciplinary Journal · 2019-09-01

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Early Modern Eunuchs and the Transing of Gender and Race

  Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies · 2019-01-01 · 52 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  This article explores various early modern figurations of the eunuch as a part of trans history as they featured prominently in the Ottoman court and on the English stage. It specifically focuses on the figure of the black eunuch within the gender and racial economy of the Mediterranean world in which not all eunuchs were marked as the same. The Ottomans maintained and promoted the visibility of eunuchs, and contributed to the proliferation of the eunuch imagery in early modern Europe. The Ottomans also separated eunuchs racially as black and white. In parallel to this separation emerged an essentializing anti-black racism in the Ottoman elite's writing that relegated black Africans to the bottom of an established racial hierarchy while marking whiteness as the ideal. These figures further circulated within a racialized hierarchy throughout Europe via chronicles, travelogues, and stories, and eventually appeared on the English stage as well-known oriental theatrical figures. This essay shows that eunuchs of the past not only denaturalize dichotomous gender models and upset phallocentric gender signification, they also illustrate how gender and race are mutually constitutive in the making of normative bodies on a global scale.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Afrodesia McCannon

  2 shared

• Jyotsna G. Singh

  1 shared

• Kris Trujillo

  1 shared

• Kris Trujillo

  University of Chicago

  1 shared

Awards & honors

• 2025 Charles Ludwig Distinguished Teaching Award
• 2025 David Delaura Teaching Award, Sponsored by the English…
• 2026/04/21 Professor Abdulhamit Arvas's New Book Wins Renais…