Breaking into the all-white academy

“You’re obviously intelligent, but you’re not intelligent enough to do a PhD in this country: you won’t finish it, more than likely. And if you did, you won’t get a teaching post, and you certainly won’t publish anything.”

This advice from a tutor I’d approached about doing a doctorate was given almost 30 years ago but those words are still burned into my brain, a supposed truth I’ve had to bat away at each stage of my career.

The meeting with the tutor, back in 1995, had not begun auspiciously: when I entered the room he had a white male student from my course in his office, and they were drinking tea and listening to Bach. When I, a Pakistani-American, walked in, my fellow student courteously got up and left. But the music went off and I was not offered a cup of tea. Then followed his brutal assessment of my career chances.

Back then, I was one of only five postgraduates on an MA programme dedicated to the poet John Milton. I had come from a state university in California where the undergraduate programme was much broader than a three-year English degree could ever be in the UK. I felt underprepared, arriving with my hefty overseas student debt and not enough 16th-century poetry under my belt. The course felt unwelcoming, though the other students were kind enough.

The separation of international students from domestic ones within university halls – which universities now realise amounts to de facto racial segregation – didn’t help. That said, I did make wonderful friends in those international dormitories, where students from all over the world were all lumped together. Each Friday, one of us would cook a dish from our country and we’d have a global food night. When it was my turn, I couldn’t work out if I should bring an American dish or a Pakistani one. I ended up making Tex-Mex as I had grown up in Texas and identified strongly with its culture (minus the right-wing politics).

It was often a strange sensation moving from the accommodation block, which was incredibly vibrant, warm and full of wonderful cooking smells, to the English department, which was cold, inhospitable and terribly daunting to a 24-year-old “foreign” student. This experience of contrast reveals how those of us not considered “insiders” for whatever reason tend to find solidarity and community through any means available. Looking back, it has become clear to me that coming to the UK to do my postgraduate degree was life-changing in the most positive of ways, but it (and my ensuing career) was also filled with multiple instances of rejection, disdain and condescension. It was – I do not use this word lightly – traumatising.

As my MA tutor’s dismissive response to my enquiry about doing a PhD indicated, the study of Early Modern literature in the UK was an exclusive club and one that I could not enter easily. At the time, all Shakespeare and Early Modern tutors were white (they still are in that department) and the other postgraduates there and elsewhere were almost exclusively white, too.

Papers delivered at the conferences I attended were again mostly from white scholars and postgraduates. I would be interrupted when I’d ask questions – on those rare occasions I felt brave enough to voice my opinion. I assumed at the time it was because I wasn’t smart enough: that maybe I didn’t have that incisive interpretative skill needed by the best literary scholars. But the reality is that MA programmes are called “taught” courses because the instructors need to “teach” advanced study skills and methodologies to ready students for research degrees. There was no real teaching on the MA programme I was enrolled in. Instead, it was assumed students would either have the talent or not, which advantages privately educated home students and those from white, middle-class backgrounds.

During my studies, I began to feel that not just my professor but the UK wanted me to go home. All the country’s institutions seemed to want to push me out. Literally. I remember while standing in the coat-check queue at the British Library an older white male academic wanted me to move ahead so he pushed the end of his long umbrella into my back to nudge me forward. Not only did it slightly hurt, but it was humiliating. Perhaps he would have done this to any younger scholar or younger female scholar, but the fact that he did it to me read as racial as well as gendered.

I did my PhD part-time while teaching in an international school to pay my own way since, I was assured, I’d never get funding. I started with a supervisor who didn’t respect my work or the topic I wanted to research. He’d take months before commenting on written work and when he did finally meet with me, he gave little feedback that was constructive or helpful. I was told to read a few items of note, but there was no real engagement with my work. I felt isolated and demoralised until a major Shakespeare scholar joined the department and became head of English. When I met with him to discuss my work and showed him my writing, he took me on as his student. Without my own proactive move to make a change, as intimidating as it felt, I would have continued flailing and would surely have dropped out, making my Milton professor’s prophecy true.

I know that many aspiring scholars experience similar harsh rejection and criticism regardless of their backgrounds; I am also aware that large numbers of early-career academics feel inadequate and exploited, working excessive hours for little pay. If they do get full-time jobs, they are bogged down by form-filling, intensive workloads, curtailed research time and are now in a situation in which it’s likely they’ll have no pension left, when they retire. But the usual horrors of British academia aside, my experience resembles that of so many scholars of colour who dare to presume that they can study and teach Shakespeare and his contemporaries within the aptly named ivory tower in the UK.

As the resident scholar at Shakespeare’s Globe for the past 19 years, I managed to have an academic career, though from the outside looking in, and it wasn’t until 2020 that I was finally awarded an adjunct professorship, at King’s College London. At the time, this appointment made me only the second professor of colour in UK Shakespeare/Early Modern studies. Prior to that, I had triple status anxiety: my gender, my ethnicity and the fact that I did not work at a bona fide academic institution, which seemed to have less academic street cred for a while.

I fought hard, not just against the kinds of prejudices I faced in academic environments – being introduced to a Swiss scholar by a white British female one, for example, as the “education officer at the Globe” when she knew my title was head of higher education and research – but also against prejudices in my own workplace against supposedly haughty academics, such as when I was accused by my then line manager of acting “superior” simply by asking for more research time to write books or wanting to expand our organisation’s research remit.

Being a woman of colour impeded my progress in lots of ways, but it did not necessarily prevent me from advancing within the Globe. However, my pay was disproportionately low by sector standards for years. I applied for several academic posts from 2010 to 2022 and even though I was shortlisted a few times, I was always pipped to the position by someone with inferior experience but who was a “safe pair of hands” or had studied or taught at that institution in question (as one head of department conceded apologetically; we all know which institutions are guilty on that score). I believe my ethnicity and the assumptions that people made about it contributed to this repeated snubbing.

This is not me being a sore loser. I recognise the immense competition in my field and am humbled by it. But when one university advertises a “Shakespeare and performance” post and I am shortlisted with my many publications on the topic and experience as a co-project manager of the design and build of an indoor Jacobean theatre, it makes you wonder why it would go to someone with no performance credentials whatsoever. It occurred to me that perhaps they never wanted a performance specialist in the first place, which was easier to believe than the alternative. I have since had to decolonise my own thinking about my abilities and my worth.

In 2016, when Shakespeare’s Globe co-hosted with King’s College London the World Shakespeare Congress, I became preoccupied (perhaps obsessed) with the lack of racial diversity in our field and the sort of cultic worship of what I have termed “the great white bard” – the Shakespeare we inherited from the 18th century, constructed as the universal genius. I was also tired of being the only scholar of colour in the room and became convinced that the Globe, with its brand of Shakespearean iconicity, had a part to play in addressing or at least opening up a UK conversation about race in Shakespeare studies. In 2018, I curated the Globe’s first Shakespeare and Race Festival (there have since been three more) as a way of drawing attention to the lack of racial equality as well as diversity in the performance, teaching and study of Shakespeare. The question of who gets to perform the most notable Shakespeare parts has ever been in dispute and, since the culture wars, is even more pressing, but the festival laid bare systemic racial inequalities when it came to casting, directing, lighting and design in theatre.

The theatre industry aside, in January 2020 I invited Shakespeareans and Early Modernists from across the UK to attend a “diversity forum” at Shakespeare’s Globe, where four incredibly brave postgraduates of colour spoke about the trauma, gatekeeping and exclusion they experienced as students in UK universities. Nicola Rollock, now professor of social policy at King’s, spoke about institutional racism in higher education, and I led a discussion about what we might do as a collective with those present who accepted my invitation.

Unfortunately, a month later, the pandemic hit us, so for a short time momentum was lost. But when George Floyd was murdered and generated a global response to Black Lives Matter, there has been a renewed interest in correcting racial disparity in the field. Shakespeare’s Globe and King’s formed a joint Shakespeare Centre, with part of its mission being to investigate the pipeline into the discipline. One goal is to promote Premodern critical race studies as a crucial methodological tool for analysis of Early Modern texts, which will attract a more diverse PhD student body. In November, we launched the Early Modern Scholars of Colour Network, an antiracist collective designed to help black and minority ethnic postgraduates and ECRs navigate the exclusionary practices within higher education and to aid them as they push against gatekeeping.

I believe there will be an increase in students of colour that want to study Shakespeare. I’ve already seen a change just in the past two years, and with this change has come extraordinary new and fresh readings of these plays as well as investigations into the history of slavery across the Mediterranean as well as Atlantic, a revised account of how Renaissance bodies are talked about that doesn’t assume they were all white, and investigations into the reception and portrayal of black women in Early Modern texts. But higher education institutions need to work much harder to enable the advancement of these scholars, make them feel they too are entitled to funding and provide them with knowledge of institutional mechanisms for study, collaboration and belonging. Notably, it isn’t just the universities that feel hostile and unwelcoming. It is also the other institutions of academia that need re-tooling, such as conferences, scholarly organisations and publishing. It is also in these spaces where long-held gatekeeping practices are still in play.

I was able to advance in my career but possibly by being on the margins of both the academy and the arts. And perhaps it is in this liminal space where I can make the most noise. I’m ever optimistic about the future of the advanced study of Shakespeare in this country. It could be dazzlingly bright, if only we opened our minds to the time’s demands. We need diverse faculty, cultures of belonging and collaborative models for change. We need space for a social justice framework for teaching and research, a supportive rather than combative senior management, robust mentorship for our students and early-career researchers and each other. But, most importantly, we need never to forget to lift as we climb.

Farah Karim-Cooper is professor of Shakespeare studies at King’s College London and co-director of education at Shakespeare’s Globe, and served as president of the Shakespeare Association of America in 2021-22. Her latest book, The Great White Bard: Shakespeare, Race and the Future, is published by Oneworld on 27 April.