Sheiba Kian Kaufman, "Persian Paradigms in Early Modern English Drama" (Oxford UP, 2025)

Jan 7, 2026

Sheiba Kian Kaufman, Assistant Professor and lecturer in English, delves into her insightful book exploring how Persian culture informs early modern drama. She challenges conventional views on Orientalism and introduces 'Persian paradigms' as frameworks for analyzing concepts of hospitality and tolerance in theatre. Kaufman highlights figures like Cyrus the Great in Jacobean plays, showcasing Persia’s impact on ideas of cosmopolitanism. She also reflects on her own Persian-American identity, bridging personal narrative with scholarly exploration.

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INSIGHT

Hospitality As Theory And Practice

Hospitality functions as both ethical theory and lived practice, central to Persian culture and useful for literary analysis.
Theater stages hospitality's risks, rewards, and rituals, making drama a natural site to explore intercultural welcome.

INSIGHT

Persian Paradigms Beyond Orientalism

'Persian paradigms' frames Persia as an analogical intellectual history, not merely an Orientalist stereotype.
Kaufman traces Persian concepts like hospitality and toleration through texts from Xenophon to English drama.

INSIGHT

Adab: Ethics Worn As Behavior

Adab combines manners, ethics, and social comportment and resists single-word translation into English.
English plays borrow these virtues via figure‑models like Cyrus, shaping characters' moral identities.

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Persian Paradigms in Early Modern English Drama examines the concept of early modern globality and the development of European toleration discourse through English representations of Persian monarchs and Persianate conceptions of hospitality as paradigms of interreligious and intercultural hospitality for early modern and Shakespearean drama.

English playwrights depict Persia and its legendary monarchs, such as Cyrus the Great, Xerxes, and Darius, as alternative figures of cosmopolitanism in the period. By focusing on an archive of plays of Persia staged between 1561 and 1696 in conversation with Shakespeare's works, European peace proposals, legislative acts of toleration, and global traditions of hospitality found in Zoroastrianism, Islam, and the Judeo-Christian traditions, this book pioneers an interdisciplinary methodology, introduces Persianate conceptual lenses for literary analysis of English literature, and constructs capacities to imagine multiple globalities existing in early modernity through a spectrum of imagined and lived experiences on stage and on the ground.

Sheiba Kian Kaufman is an Assistant Professor of English at Saddleback College and Lecturer at the University of California, Irvine. She is the author of articles on Shakespeare, Persia, and early modern English drama. She has received fellowships from the UCLA Center for 17th-and 18th Century Studies, Clark Library, the UCI Samuel Jordan Center for Persian Studies and Culture, the UCI Center in Law, Society, and Culture, Somerville College, Oxford, and the American Association of University Women.

Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Twitter.

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