The goal of this year’s MRGSA colloquium is to discuss and engage with issues of race in premodern studies and its scholarship—including its literature, religion, art, history, and culture—while thinking about how scholars can locate and explore the way race functioned premodernity. By investigating race in medieval and early modern studies and supporting scholars of color, MRGSA aims to amplify race as a lens of investigation that will encourage participating scholars—faculty, staff, graduate, and undergraduate affiliates of CMRS and Ohio State University—to explore and deal with questions of race in the pre-modern world. There is a dire need to continue integrating premodern critical race studies into our curricular development and to expand and diversify our inclusion efforts in the field. MRGSA seeks to develop rich and engaging conversations about premodern critical race studies and to push us towards using race as a significant and crucial framework in our field.
The workshop portion "Teaching Pre-Modern Race" will feature a discussion moderated by Professor Amrita Dhar (OSU) with Professor Mira Kafantaris (Butler University), Professor Carol Mejia-LaPerle (Wright State University), and Professor Kirsten Mendoza (University of Dayton).
Please register here for the workshop portion of the colloquium, and keep in mind that space is limited to the first 20 participants.
This event is free and open to the public, but registration is required.
This event is co-sponsored by the Medieval and Renaissance Graduate Student Organization, Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, the Humanities Institute, Disability Studies Program, and Department of English.
Amrita Dhar grew up in Calcutta, and studied at the universities of Jadavpur (India), Cambridge (UK), and Michigan (USA). At The Ohio State University, she teaches courses on a range of topics: early modern literature, disability studies, critical race and postcolonial studies, migration studies, and the environmental humanities. She is also a climber and mountaineer, and works and writes on world mountaineering literatures. As a teacher, she is deeply invested in her students’ intellectual growth and well-being.
Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Milton Studies, postmedieval, The Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry, Radical Teacher, Shakespeare Bulletin, The Himalayan Journal, and various edited collections. Her work has been supported by the University of Michigan‘s Rackham Graduate School, Department of English Language and Literature, and Institute for Research on Women and Gender; the Folger Shakespeare Library; the SSHRC (Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada) project Early Modern Conversions; the Huntington Library; The Women’s Place at The Ohio State University; the College of Arts and Sciences at The Ohio State University, and the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Mira Assaf Kafantaris (she/her/hers) specializes in Premodern Critical Race Studies, Shakespeare, and Early Modern Culture. She is completing her first manuscript, titled Royal Marriage, Foreign Queens, and Racial Formations in the Early Modern Period. Her public-facing work has appeared in The Sundial, The Millions, Overland Journal, The Rambling, The Conversation, Medium-Equity, and The Platform. She is co-editing, with Sonja Drimmer and Treva B. Lindsey, a special issue of the Barnard Center for Research on Women’s journal, The Scholar and Feminist Online, titled "Race-ing Queens."
Dr Assaf Kafantaris is affiliated with Race, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Butler and is the 21-22 Folger Shakespeare Library and Society for the Study of Early Women and Gender Margaret Hannay Fellow.
Dr. Carol Mejia-LaPerle is Professor and Honors Advisor for the Department of English at Wright State University. Her research interests include Renaissance/early modern drama, poetry and culture, critical race theory, gender studies, philosophies of will, and affective performances of and in Shakespeare. She regularly teaches a survey of early English literature, special topics in early modern drama, and the methods and materials of academic research. An active blog site for her Study Abroad program to the Stratford Theatre Festival of Canada can be found here: http://blogs.wright.edu/learn/stratfordcanada/
Her work has been supported by Wright State University’s Research Council, College of Liberal Arts Research Grant, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the National Humanities Center, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. She was selected to participate in the "Gender, Race, and Early Modern Studies" colloquium held at the Folger Shakespeare Library throughout 2017-2018 and was an invited speaker for the 2019 RaceB4Race Symposium on Periodization and Race: https://acmrs.asu.edu/public-events/symposia/race-and-periodization
Kirsten N. Mendoza is an Assistant Professor of English and Human Rights. Her first book project, A Politics of Touch: The Racialization of Consent in Early Modern English Literature, examines the conceptual ties that link shifting 16th and 17th century discourses on sexual consent with England’s colonial endeavors, involvement in the slave trade and global mercantile pursuits. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Renaissance Drama, Shakespeare Bulletin, The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Race, The Norton Critical Edition of Doctor Faustus, Race and Affect in Early Modern English Literature, Teaching Social Justice Through Shakespeare: Why Renaissance Literature Matters Now, and Arden of Faversham: A Critical Reader. Her research has been supported with grants from the Huntington Library, Newberry Library and the Folger Shakespeare Library.
