According to Brittney Cooper in her entry for The Oxford Handbook for Feminist Theory, “intersectionality,” a term “coined by Kimberlé Crenshaw in 1989” based on a century of Black women’s theorizing, “has become the key analytic framework through which feminist scholars in various fields talk about the structural identities of race, class, gender, and sexuality.” Subsequent theorists have added categories such as nation, religion, age, and disability. Its application to the early modern period, which runs from around 1500 to 1800, has involved investigations and interrogations of “a range of identity positions” in the context of “systems of power” with attention to the emerging and established empires of the era, including the British, Spanish, and Ottoman (Turkish). This class will focus on English-language literary responses to two salient figures who travelled into the heart of Europe from the margins of these empires: John Leo Africanus/Hasan ibn Muhammad al-Wazzan al-Fasi and Pocahontas/Matoaka. Works we will consider include Ben Jonson’s court masques and William Shakespeare’s stage plays from the early seventeenth century, as well as later seventeenth-century drama and prose writing by John Dryden and Aphra Behn.