A one-day conference featuring new work by early career scholars, hosted by CEMS in collaboration with MMOR (‘Medicine and the Making of Race, 1440-1720’).

Register to attend in person (limited capacity).
Register for the live stream.

Keynote speakers: Surekha Davies & Nicholas R. Jones

Papers from: Ana Howie (University of Cambridge); Andrew Kettler (Kenyon College); Arianna Ray (Northwestern University); Ato Quirin Schweizer (Universität Duisburg-Essen); Dessalegn Bizuneh Ayele (University of Gondar); Eli Cumings (University of Cambridge); Hassana Moosa (King’s College London); Hayley Negrin (University of Illinois); Miguel A Valerio (Washington University in St. Louis); Mira Assaf Kafantaris (Butler University); Rebecca Teresi (Johns Hopkins); Rodrigo Toromoreno (Universidad San Francisco de Quito).

More than twenty-five years have passed since the near coincidence in print of Margo Hendricks’ and Patricia Parker’s edited volume, Women, Race and Writing, and Kim Hall’s Things of Darkness, which together definitively established race as a Renaissance category. Whether reinventing racialized discourse, materializing racial hierarchies, or building scientific methodologies, the languages of blackness that arose within early modern Europe bequeathed new semantic meaning to the term race and attached to it a web of signifiers. Beyond text, the political violence of colonialism and slavery situated the process of racial subjugation as constitutive of European (early) modernity. The justifications for skin colour as a signifier, situate race as central to broader aspects of European culture, including religion, science, and medicine. Early modern race-making was neither linear, nor straightforward. Even as diasporic communities and individuals asserted identities and lived lives subverting historiographical fictions of homogeneity, race was crucial, and its contours and ramifications have yet to be fixed.

Taking stock of past scholarship and looking in new, interdisciplinary directions, this conference poses two main questions:

• How should we re-think the category of the “early modern” in light of the role of race-making to its central conceits?

• Given the central role of the early modern to longer historical processes of racialization, how can we make better sense of its specificity – of the inconsistencies, ruptures and silences in which early modern race-making resided?

This is the opening conference of MMoR (Medicine and the Making of Race, 1440-1720), a four-year UKRI FLF-funded project exploring the role of medical practitioners in the early modern slave trade. In keeping with the project’s aim to bring together historiographical approaches from literary studies, scholarship on the African diaspora and slavery, and the history of science, “Race and the Early Modern” aims to showcase new work featuring diverse methodological approaches, interrogating different geographical contexts and chronologies within the wider remit of the early modern.