Patricia Akhimie is Director of the Folger Institute at the Folger Shakespeare Library, and Director of the RaceB4Race Mentorship Network. From 2011 to 2023, she served as Assistant and then Associate Professor of English at Rutgers University-Newark, where she received the Warren I. Susman Award for Excellence in Teaching (2021) and the Excellence in Online Teaching Award (2023). She is author of Shakespeare and the Cultivation of Race: Race and Conduct in the Early Modern World (Routledge, 2018), co-editor, with Bernadette Andrea of Travel and Travail: Early Modern Women, English Drama, and the Wider World (University of Nebraska Press, 2019), and editor of the Arden Othello (4th series). Her research has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Folger Shakespeare Library, the John Carter Brown Library, and the Ford Foundation.