The Race and the Early Modern seminar is delighted to be welcoming Dr. Eli Cumings on 7th December to discuss a paper titled: ‘horns, Weeds, Briars: Reading Race in Colonial Ireland’. To participate, sign up via the link below. This is a work-in-progress session. The paper will be distributed in advance of the session.
Date and Time: Monday 7th December, 17:00 (BST)/12:oo (ET)
Sign up here: https://buytickets.at/centreforearlymodernstudies/2022021
Paper Abstract
Reading a series of texts written by (or sympathetic to) the New English colonists in sixteenth-century Ireland, this chapter examines the hermeneutic dimensions of early modern discourses of human difference. In particular, it explores how the Irish and their allies were conceived of as a “race” apart; how their identity was projected onto divine agency and tied to the natural environment; and how human relations were themselves read in teleological, and even apocalyptic, terms. In doing so, the chapter draws attention to the literary qualities of early modern race-making, and situates this process in relation to broader questions concerning the nature and meaning of earthly experience.
Speaker Bio
Dr. Eli Cumings is a Lecturer in Early Modern Literature at King's College London. She received her PhD from Cambridge in 2023 with a thesis on human monstrosity, after which she was employed as a research associate on the UKRI-funded project ‘Medicine and the Making of Race'. From 2024-2026, she was a member of the Society of Fellows at Columbia University. Her current book project, provisionally entitled Exemplary Bodies: Providence and Human Difference in Early Modern England, explores the representation and interpretation of human difference in early modernity. Aspects of this research have been published in Renaissance Studies and Spenser Studies. Other work has been published or is forthcoming in volumes on Shakespearean appropriations, shipoard writing, and monster theory.
Image from William Lawson, A New Orchard and Garden (1633)