Sujata Iyengar

Sujata Iyengar* (Ph.D., Stanford University, 1998), Professor, specializes in English Renaissance Literature, Shakespearean Adaptation and Appropriation, and Book History and Arts.

Dr. Iyengar's first book was the germinal monograph Shades of Difference: Mythologies of Skin Color and Race in Early Modern England (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005); other books include Shakespeare's Medical Language (Bloomsbury/Arden, 2011),  several print and digital co-authored textbooks, the edited collections Disability, Health, and Happiness in the Shakespearean Body (Routledge, 2015) and Shakespeare and Global Appropriation (Routledge, 2020), and Shakespeare and Adaptation Theory (Bloomsbury/Arden). Essays include an award-winning article in ELH (2002), and articles in Shakespeare Quarterly, Shakespeare Survey, Literature/Film Quarterly, Shakespeare, Postmodern Culture, Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England, Cahiers Élisabéthains and elsewhere as well as in peer-reviewed collections from the Folger Shakespeare Library, Purdue University Press, the University of Pennsylvania Press, the University of Toronto Press, Ashgate, Palgrave, Cambridge University Press, Oxford University Press, and Routledge.

Dr. Iyengar spent academic year 2014-2015 on a Study in a Second Discipline Fellowship at the Lamar Dodd School of Art, taking courses in Letterpress, Paper-making, Book Arts and Typography. Her year in the Art School inspired her to begin writing poetry as well as to teach it; her free and formal lyrics have been published in a few juried "little magazines" in print and online, including Punctum Press's Lunch; Mezzo Cammin; Upstart Crow; Unsplendid; and Measure.

A winner of the Special Sandy Beaver Award for Excellence in Teaching and of Fellowships from the Office of Service-Learning and the Office of Online Learning at UGA, Dr. Iyengar likes to collaborate with units and departments from all over campus and, most recently, internationally. She has developed experiential, interdisciplinary, service-learning, hybrid, and "hyflex" courses, delivered guest-lectures, or team-taught workshops at the graduate and undergraduate levels with faculty from: the GRU/UGA Medical Partnership in Athens; the College of Public Health; the Health and Medical Journalism Program; the Department of History; the UGA at Oxford Program; UGA's Sustainable Development Program; the College of Education; the UGA Libraries; the State Botanical Gardens; and with local elementary, middle, and adult education classes. She has been invited to speak about her state-of-the-art pedagogical practice at the University of Wisconsin-LaCrosse and the University of Alabama and has twice been accepted to present at the annual University System of Georgia Teaching and Learning Conference. In 2019, as part of her multi-year international grant-funded collaboration with Université Paul Valéry Montpellier 3, she took UGA PhD candidates to a middle school in France to work with faculty and students on their performances of Othello for the Montpellier Theatre Festival.

With the late Christy Desmet, Dr. Iyengar co-founded the online, peer-reviewed, multimedia, scholarly journal Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation, which won First Prize in the "Best New Journal" category from the Council of Editors of Learned Journals (2007). The journal celebrated its tenth anniversary in November 2015 and, with the support of the Willson Center for Humanities and Arts, the Office of the Provost, the UGA Libraries, the Graduate School, the UGA Symposium on the Book, and the Departments of English and Theatre and Film Studies, co-hosted an international conference, open to the public, in Athens on "Appropriation in an Age of Global Shakespeare." You can listen to a radio interview with the founding editors here: http://wuga.uga.edu/uploads/audio/151111_Appropriation_in_an_Age_of_Global_Shakespear.mp3.

The journal is now published in partnership with the Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, the Texas Digital Library, and the Willson Center. Dr. Iyengar co-edits the journal with Dr. Matthew Kozusko, Ursinus College, and Dr. Louise Geddes, Adelphi University, with whom she also collaborates on remote, team-taught internships for students on digital publishing and scholarly editing.

*My name is pronounced

Su-JAH-t(h)a AYE-en-gar

In my first name, the "j" is pronounced as an English letter j; the "t" is a soft t as in as "Spanish-language" t. The "a" vowels in my first name are the so-called "classless" a's in British English, i.e. the sound of a long a but the length of a short one. In my surname, the "e" in "en" is a schwa or neutral vowel, slightly nasalized. The "g" is hard. The final "r" is "tripped" i.e. pronounced but not trilled.