early modern literature, race, religion, politics, and pop culture
This bibliography offers a genealogy of the scholarly work in premodern (critical) race studies. It exhibits the long history of this scholarship and shows the new directions for critical inquiry that have emerged in recent years.
This week, Jan 20-23, 2021 saw the first online iteration of the biannual #RaceB4Race symposium. Having shifted to the online format due to the global Covid-19 pandemic, this meeting was also the first in the wake of the global uprising for the movement for Black Lives that erupted in the Summer of 2020 after the … Continue reading After Race Before Race: Education
#RaceB4Race #ShakeRace #medievaltwitter This past weekend (Jan 17-18), the Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, held the third iteration of its RaceB4Race conference at Arizona State University. The theme of the conference was “Appropriations,” and as the program explained, "this RaceB4Race event focuses on how the term appropriation has recently signified in different ways … Continue reading After Race Before Race: Appropriations
I'm going to be speaking at UCR's "Race and the Premodern" speaker series on Thursday, November 7, 2019. In my talk, I will be referencing a course I taught in 2016 "Race, Gender, and Class in Renaissance Drama," and I'd like to share that syllabus here. I don't have in-class assignments on this syllabus. However, … Continue reading Early Modern Drama Syllabus: A #ShakeRace resource
In the fall semester of 2018, my students at Harvey Mudd College participated in “The Quality of Mercy Project,” whose remit was to offer a collaborative but locally inflected vision of what The Merchant of Venice communicates to us and how we can, in turn, perform and transform this play given our particular, regional interests … Continue reading Looking for Mercy in The Merchant of Venice
image credit: Shakespeare's Globe Over the past 10 days I have been thinking about how privileged I am to be able to do the work I do: to read and teach Shakespeare, to critically think and write about how the artistic and cultural legacies of the past ripple through time to affect our present. While … Continue reading Shakespeare and Race at the Globe
About a month before I traveled to Malta, I received proofs of an article on an Early Modern English play called The Knight of Malta. The timing was quite fortuitous, reminding me not only of my research interests in the construction of racial difference via ideologies of religious difference, but also of my interest in … Continue reading The Fluid Mediterranean
Why we need a Trump Shakespeare I will begin with a straightforward contention: “Literature is good to think with. It makes us better analysts, better interpreters, better readers. It doesn’t supply answers.”[1] This will seem like a contradiction: that we acquire various critical thinking skills, yet we don’t utilize them in the service of … Continue reading Why we need a Trump Shakespeare
Ambereen Dadabhoy 