Room 232, Walker Building.
Please RSVP by Wed, March 20 at the EventBrite link above. Non-Emerson guests must RSVP to be given security access to the event.
Free and open to the public.
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“The Myth of the Pre-Racial in the Middle Ages”
Abstract: This talk will address the centrality of race in the Middle Ages and why the historiography of the term “race” in the 19th and 20th century explains why so many scholars and the general public refuse to use race as a category of analysis for the pre-modern past. What is race in the pre-modern and why is it an essential frame to discuss the Middle Ages particularly in our current political moment as the alt-right continues to use the medieval past as a rhetorical tool to uphold and promulgate white supremacy?
Bio: Dorothy Kim teaches at Brandeis University and focuses on race, gender, digital humanities, medieval women’s literary cultures, Jewish/Christian difference, book history, digital media, and the alt-right. Her monograph, Jewish/Christian Entanglements: Ancrene Wisse and its Material Worlds, is forthcoming from the University of Toronto Press and she has two books, The Alt-Medieval: Digital Whiteness and Medieval Studies and Decolonize the Middle Ages, forthcoming with ArcPress. She is also co-editing A Cultural History of Race in the Renaissance and Early Modern Age (1350-1550) with Bloomsbury and a special issue of Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality.
Certain books were “banned in Boston” at least as far back as 1651, when one William Pynchon wrote a book criticizing Puritanism.