Roya Biggie is an American Council of Learned Societies Fellow and Assistant Professor of English. She earned her Ph.D. from the City University of New York Graduate Center, her M.A. from Georgetown University, and her B.A. from St. Mary’s College of Maryland.

Her research and teaching interests include early modern literature, the history of science, and early modern race and colonization. Roya is currently completing her book manuscript, Sympathetic Ecologies in Early Modern English Tragedies. The project positions sympathy as a vital framework through which the English conceptualized contact across class and racial divides. Research for this project has been supported by the ACLS, the Huntington Library, and the Folger Shakespeare Library. 

Some of her favorite courses to teach include “Race and Empire in the Renaissance Literary Imaginary,” “The Afterlives of Othello,” and “Introduction to Shakespeare.” Roya has also served as the faculty advisor to The Common Room, Knox’s undergraduate journal of literary and cultural criticism.

Her scholarship has appeared in Renaissance Drama, Early Modern Literary Studies, Early Theatre and in the collections Situating Shakespeare Pedagogy (Edinburgh UP, 2024), Teaching Race in the European Renaissance (ACMRS UP, 2023), and Lesser Living Creatures of the Renaissance (Penn State UP, 2023).