Ian Smith

Summary Statement of Research Interests

Ian Smith is the Leo S. Bing Chair in English and American Literature and Professor of English at the University of Southern California. His scholarship asks how cultural and critical traditions have conditioned readers not to see race in Shakespeare and other early modern texts. By challenging inherited habits of interpretation, his work demonstrates how deeply race informs the period’s language, literature, and structures of thought.

Smith is the author of Black Shakespeare: Reading and Misreading Race (Cambridge University Press, 2022), named a Choice Outstanding Academic Title. The book exposes interpretive habits that have made race seem marginal or invisible in Shakespeare and argues for the racial literacy needed to recognize its textual and cultural relevance. His earlier book, Race and Rhetoric in Renaissance England: Barbarian Errors (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), traces how the concept of barbarism, originating in rhetoric and grammar, was used to racialize difference in the ancient and, subsequently, early modern worlds. He also collaborated with artist Curlee Holton on Othello Re-imagined in Sepia, an artist’s book.

His current book project, “White Skins, Black Masks,” turns from racial interpretation to racial embodiment, examining early modern whiteness, blackface, and the prosthetic materials and practices of racial impersonation. Smith served as president of the Shakespeare Association of America in 2023–24 and has held fellowships from the Huntington, Folger, Clark, and Newberry libraries. His teaching encompasses Shakespeare, critical race and queer studies, postcolonial literature, modern drama, and contemporary fiction. He is also a co-leader of “Critical Interventions,” a seminar offered by the USC-Huntington Early Modern Studies Institute.