Professor of English
Academic Degrees
Dr. Maya Mathur, Professor of English, holds a Ph.D. and M.A. from the University at Buffalo and a B.A. from St. Stephen’s College, Delhi. Her teaching and research focus on Shakespeare and early modern drama, Shakespeare and race, and Shakespeare and adaptation.
Dr. Mathur’s scholarship on comic form and popular politics has appeared in the Journal for Medieval and Early Modern Studies, the Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies, Early Theater, Early Modern Literary Studies, and The Cultural History of Comedy in the Early Modern Age. Her recent research on the topic investigates how premodern comic forms can be vehicles for race-making. Her scholarship on Shakespeare, race, and adaptation is forthcoming in the journal, Borrowers and Lenders, and the volume, Shakespeare and Anglophone Popular Culture.
Dr. Mathur also publishes on Shakespeare and pedagogy. Her ongoing research draws on the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) to examine the impact of an intersectional approach on student engagement with Shakespeare. In 2022, she led a year-long learning community on Inclusive Course Design in collaboration with UMW’s Center for Teaching. Her work on teaching Shakespeare has appeared in the edited collections, Teaching Race in the European Renaissance, Inclusive Shakespeares, and Approaches to Teaching Romeo and Juliet.
Dr. Mathur is the recipient of UMW’s 2022 Grellet C. Simpson Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching.