Join Amrita Sen, in conversation with Guido van Meersbergen, Su Fang Ng, & Jyotsna Singh as they celebrate the publication of Performing India in Early Modern England 1575-1642: Commerce, Spectacle, and the Formation of the East India Company with friends, colleagues, and well-wishers.

Situating itself against the transitional moment of first direct contact of English merchants with the Indian subcontinent, this book examines what it might have meant to perform as Indian in distinct economic and political spaces in early modern England.

Turning to the years leading up to and following the establishment of the East India Company, it explores how the arrival of new material imports intersected with questions of racecraft and cultural appropriation on the English stage. It sheds new light on the cultural impact of the East Indies trade by examining late sixteenth and early seventeenth century drama including public theatres, court masques, and civic pageantry. This book views England’s domestic and civic spaces as contact zones, where members of the monarchy or London companies performed as Indians in ritual or political drama. To perform India was to negotiate questions of racecraft, cosmopolitan, and new English gains in global commerce.

Amrita Sen is Associate Professor and Deputy Director, UGC-MMTTC, University of Calcutta, and affiliated faculty, Department of English. She has published extensively on early modern drama, East India Company women, Mughal collecting, and Indian Shakespeares. She has also recently co-edited Early Modern Performance Beyond the Public Stage: Extra-Theatrical Forms and Spaces, with Jennifer Linhart Wood, and Shakespeare in the ‘Post’ Colonies: Legacies, Cultures and Social Justice with Amrita Dhar.

Guido van Meersbergen is Reader in Early Modern Global History at the University of Warwick. He is the author of Ethnography and Encounter: The Dutch and English in Seventeenth-Century South Asia (Brill: 2022) and co-editor of Trading Companies and Travel Knowledge in the Early Modern World (Routledge: 2022) and the forthcoming volume Travel and (De)coloniality: Critical Case Studies (Routledge: 2027). Guido directs the Global History and Culture Centre at Warwick and co-edits the Journal of Global History, and is currently working on an edition of the diaries of Sir William Norris' embassy to Mughal India (1699-1702).

Su Fang Ng is Professor of English and Cutchins Professor at Virginia Tech. She is the author of Literature and the Politics of Family in Seventeenth-Century England (Cambridge UP 2007); Alexander the Great from Britain to Southeast Asia: Peripheral Empires in the Global Renaissance (Oxford UP 2019), which won the 2020 RSA Gordan book prize; and Writing About Discovery in the Early Modern East Indies (Cambridge UP 2022). She is co-editing the Cambridge Companion to Global Literary Culture, revising a book on Brokering with Caliban: East Indies Diplomacy in Early Modern Drama, and working a book on cartographic poetics based on the Singleton distinguished lectures she delivered at Johns Hopkins.

Jyotsna G. Singh is a Professor Emerita of English at Michigan State University. She has published widely on early modern literature and culture, including Shakespeare, postcolonial theory, colonial history, and race and gender studies. Her books include: Colonial Narratives/Cultural Dialogues (1996); Shakespeare and Postcolonial Theory, (2019), A Companion to the Global Renaissance, 2nd expanded ed. (2021); and A Contextual Guide to Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra, 2026 (co-author Daniel Vitkus). She is co-editing (with Matthew Dimmock) a new edition of Shakespeare's The Tempest for Cambridge University (forthcoming 2028). She is co-editor of the series, New Transculturalisms published by Manchester University Press.

Book Launch: Performing India in Early Modern England, 1575-1642