Urvashi Chakravarty is Associate Professor of English at the University of Toronto and works on early modern English literature, critical race studies, queer studies, and the history of slavery.

Her first book, Fictions of Consent: Slavery, Servitude, and Free Service in Early Modern England (Penn Press, 2022), explores the ideologies of Atlantic slavery in early modern England, revealing the everyday sites where the foundations of racialized slavery were laid, and is the first book in Penn Press’s new series on “RaceB4Race: Critical Race Studies of the Premodern.” Her second book, currently in progress, is titled From Fairest Creatures: Race, Reproduction, and Slavery in the Early Modern British Atlantic World, and examines the nexus of race and reproduction in the early modern Atlantic world, including the construction of white womanhood and white childhood and their relationship to the structures of colonial violence and enslavement.

Articles on (among other subjects) early modern race and reproduction; queer and racialized futurity; labour, domestic service, and whiteness; the “spiriting” of indentured labourers; racial fictions; and the future of early modern race studies appear or are forthcoming in English Literary Renaissance, Shakespeare Quarterly, Renaissance Quarterly, The Journal For Early Modern Cultural Studies, Spenser Studies, postmedieval, Literature Compass, and the edited collections Queering Childhood in Early Modern English Drama and Culture, Shakespeare/Sex: Contemporary Readings in Gender and Sexuality, and The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare and Race. She serves on the Executive Board of RaceB4Race, a scholarly and public-facing network and conference series which explores race and racial formation in premodern history and culture.