Abdulhamit Arvas is 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. He is an extraordinary member of Exeter College of the University of Oxford. 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 (RSA), as well as 2026 First Book Award by Shakespeare Association of America (SAA). Boys Abducted explores early modern sexuality, gender, and race in a transcultural context; specifically, studying English and Ottoman literatures together, this book focuses on the abduction and circulation of male adolescents as part of imperial politics in the transnational Mediterranean space  during the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Examining the tensions and dissonances between the aestheticized eroticism of literary and cultural representations and the violent history of abductions, conversions, and enslavements, this book reveals the relationships among homoeroticism, race, and empire in the early modern period.

Dr. Arvas co-edited the tenth anniversary issue of postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies, titled Critical Confessions Now (2020), which has been re-issued as a book (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023). He is currently working on an introduction to a new edition of Shakespeare's Othello by the Oxford University Press, while completing his second monograph, titled The Grammar of the Other: Translation and the (Un)Making of Gender, Sexual, and Racial Difference. His other publications appeared in journals including English Literary Renaissance, Journal of Early Modern Cultural Studies, Shakespeare Survey, postmedieval, GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, and in edited collections such as The Postcolonial World, The Cambridge History of Gay and Lesbian Literature, England’s Asian Renaissance, Trans Historical: Gender Plurality Before the Modern, and The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Race. 

Dr. Arvas has been awarded fellowships and grants by Fulbright, the Folger Shakespeare Library,  SSHRC Early Modern Conversions at the University of Cambridge, the University of Oxford, and the University of California Humanities Research Institute. At Penn, he received the 2025 Charles Ludwig Distinguished Teaching Award, and David Delaura Teaching Award in 2022 and 2025.

Dr. Arvas received his BA from Hacettepe University (Turkey), MA from Eastern Michigan University, and PhD in English from Michigan State University. Prior to joining Penn English, he was Assistant Professor of Theater at the University of California Santa Barbara and Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Shakespeare in Drama at Vassar College.