Dr Hassana Moosa
Dr Hassana Moosa
Research Editor, MEMOs

Dr Hassana Moosa is Research Editor at Medieval and Early Modern Orients (MEMOs). She completed her PhD, funded by the Commonwealth Scholarship Commission, at the Department of English at King’s College London. Her research explores sixteenth and seventeenth century English literary, especially dramatic, representations of Islamic figures from the Ottoman Empire and the Maghreb through a lens of critical and early modern race theory. She is interested in creating dialogues between early modern English views on the Mediterranean slave trade and English discourses of empire, race and slavery that later develop in the tragedies of the Transatlantic slave trade. She completed her BA (Hons) and MA at the University of Cape Town, South Africa where she also worked for several years in various research, administrative and teaching roles. She is also interested in African diasporic literature and postcolonial theory. She tweets @HassanaMoosa. She can be reached at [email protected].










Othello and the Ottomans
Othello and the Ottomans
The ‘Turks’ are an ominous presence in Shakespeare’s Othello who trigger and drive events in the play
8 April 2024
Picturing Muslims: Nicholas Nicholay’s Muslim Women
Picturing Muslims: Nicholas Nicholay’s Muslim Women
Playwrights did not only create fearsome, tyrannical Turkish male characters but also a wide range of interesting female Muslim characters.
19 September 2022
Picturing Muslims: Gentile Bellini’s "The Sultan Mehmet II"
Picturing Muslims: Gentile Bellini’s "The Sultan Mehmet II"
It is tempting to consider the possibility that Barleti himself may have come into contact with the painting
18 April 2022
Race/Rase/Raze in Richard Eden’s 'The Decades of the Newe Worlde'
Race/Rase/Raze in Richard Eden’s 'The Decades of the Newe Worlde'
The definitions and uses of ‘race’ and ‘rase’ were extensive and the spelling forms of these words were inconsistent
17 January 2022
The Turk and the Polyglot Play in Thomas Kyd’s ‘The Spanish Tragedy’
The Turk and the Polyglot Play in Thomas Kyd’s ‘The Spanish Tragedy’
Kyd, they suggest, was likely following the rhetorical strategies frequently employed in English Protestant polemics, the ‘Turk’ was used as a symbol of evil.
11 October 2021
MEMOs Bibliography on Pre-Modern Race Studies and Islam: Introductory Notes
MEMOs Bibliography on Pre-Modern Race Studies and Islam: Introductory Notes
The dire need to continue and expand studies into the histories and legacies of race and racism needs little explanation.
17 May 2021
Historical Connections: The Black Page in Henry Irving’s Victorian 'The Merchant of Venice'
Historical Connections: The Black Page in Henry Irving’s Victorian 'The Merchant of Venice'
It is possible that Irving added this character to emphasize features of the African, Muslim Prince
21 February 2021