Scholar of race and performance.
Although she is frequently labeled a “Shakespeare scholar,” a more adequate label for Ayanna Thompson is something closer to a “performance race scholar.” Thompson’s research employs historicist, theoretical, pedagogical, and practical lenses to ask how race operates in performance and as a performance. Her books range in topic from the history of blackface performances in the US and UK to the history of inclusive casting on Shakespearean stages to practical pedagogical strategies for creating student-centered classrooms.
An innovative, interdisciplinary scholar, Thompson models ways to bring disparate fields, methodologies, and theories together to tackle how the past informs our present and our potential futures. As the founder of RaceB4Race she has also modeled ways to reinvent scholarly communities by centering BIPOC knowledge, methods of inquiry, curricula, and creative collaborations.
Ayanna Thompson was appointed Regents Professor at Arizona State University in 2020.
Because of her wide-ranging interests, she is on the editorial boards of numerous scholarly journals and university press series. Thompson served as the President of the Shakespeare Association of America, was one of Phi Beta Kappa’s Visiting Scholars, a member of the Board of Directors for the Association of Marshall Scholars, and in 2021 she was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Thompson is an Associate Scholar and the chair of the Royal Shakespeare Company’s Research Board, and was recently elected to the Folger Shakespeare Library Board of Governors.
In 2021, she was awarded a $3.5 million grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to support RaceB4Race at the Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies. This cross institutional award, which includes subgrants at Brandeis University and Rutgers University, focuses on curricular development, field diversification, academic mentorship, and public humanities work around race in premodern humanities fields.
Research funding
Ayanna Thompson is the recipient of many grants and research awards totaling just under $5 million. She is the PI on projects funded by the Mellon Foundation, the Hitz Foundation, the Presidential Strategic Initiative Grant at ASU, and the Arizona Community Foundation. She is the Co-PI on projects funded by SSRC-NEH, the Mellon Foundation, and the Institute for Humanities Research at ASU.
Public work
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An Evening with Fred Moten and Jericho Brown
Ayanna Thompson in conversation with Fred Moten and Jericho brown as the keynote event for the RaceB4Race Poetics symposium in January 2023.
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NPR Code Switch: All That Glisters Is Not Gold
It's a widely accepted truth: reading Shakespeare is good for you. But what should we do with all of the bigoted themes in his work? The hosts of NPR Code Switch talk to a group of high schoolers who put on the Merchant of Venice as a way to interrogate anti-Semitism, and then talk to Ayanna Thompson about adaptations of Shakespeare.
Image: LA Johnson/NPR
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Shakespeare and Blackface / Shakespeare and Unfreedom
Ayanna Thompson gave the keynote address at "Shakespeare and Social Justice: Scholarship and Performance in an Unequal World", a conference hosted by the Shakespeare Society of Southern Africa as part of its 2019 triennial congress.
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TomorrowTalks with Percival Everett
Ayanna Thompson in conversation with Percival Everett as a part of the ASU Department of English’s TomorrowTalks program.
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BlacKKKShakespearean: A Call to Action for Medieval and Early Modern Studies
Collaboratively written by Kimberly Anne Coles, Kim F. Hall, and Ayanna Thompson.
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TomorrowTalks with Ayanna Thompson
Arizona State University presents scholar, activist, and "Othello-whisperer" Ayanna Thompson as a guest in its TomorrowTalks series. Thompson discussed her book, Blackface (Object Lessons). The conversation with Thompson was facilitated by ASU's Lisa Anderson, an associate professor of women and gender studies and deputy director in the School of Social Transformation.