Please join the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies for its first colloquium of the 2020-2021 academic year! Kirsten Mendoza, Assistant Professor of English at the University of Dayton, will present her current research on The Countess of Montgomery’s Urania (1621), the first prose romance written by an English woman, Lady Mary Wroth. Professor Mendoza will explore the ways that romance itself is part of the shifting contours of race discourses, and suggests that Wroth’s Urania can be understood as an imaginative ordering of an expansive and diverse worldview, in which Christian civility and the interior space of women’s erotic lives provide the grounds that accommodate the necessary cross-cultural relationships and politically and religiously inflected alliances that inevitably occur through increased travel, commerce, and trade in a global early modernity.
Bio: Kirsten Mendoza is an Assistant Professor of Early Modern Studies and Human Rights at the University of Dayton. Her research and teaching centers on British early modern drama and literature, consent, premodern critical race studies, gender, sexuality, and the intersections of law and literature. Her work has been supported through grants from the Huntington Library, Newberry Library, and the Folger Shakespeare Library and has been published in Teaching Social Justice Through Shakespeare: Why Renaissance Literature Matters Now and The Rambling. Her first book manuscript A Politics of Touch: The Racialization of Consent in Early Modern English Drama analyzes the intersections of bodies of alterity and sexual violence in theatrical performances from the Elizabethan to the Restoration periods.
