Critical Race Conversations

A Folger Institute Fiftieth Anniversary Project

Supported by the Mellon Initiative in Collaborative Research

For a full list of offerings click here

Constructions of race have upheld racist structures of inequality for hundreds of years. These constructions were founded upon many types of difference, based on faith, on family, on blood and body, on ways of acting and thinking and being in the world. They were so pervasive that they became operative in lived experiences, medical discourses, founding principles, and legal statutes. Racial injustice has been and continues to be systemic and damaging. Today, premodern critical race studies scholars are offering new insights into the prehistory of modern racialized thinking and racism. They are helping to create anti-racist spaces. And they are furthering an overdue and necessary push towards reinvigorated investigations, innovative teaching agendas, and social and political activism, all with the goal of creating a more just, inclusive academy and society.

Across the 2020–2021 academic year, the Folger Institute will host a series of free online sessions to address an expansive range of topics in the field of early modern critical race studies. The Institute is providing the framework and platform, but, as is our practice, we turn to scholars across disciplines and career stages to lead discussions from their own experience and expertise. We strive to feature scholars who will write fuller histories of this transformative period that is early modernity, who will acknowledge deeper and more complex roots to enduring social challenges, and who will conduct more inclusive investigations of our contested pasts. We have much to learn.

A major premise of this series is that we are our most generative selves in conversation with each other. We want those we invite to be able to speak with their colleagues, to ask each other engaging questions that advance knowledge on the aspects of critical race studies that they choose to discuss, all against a backdrop of powerful readings and other resources that they select to situate their conversations.

This series is only part of a much wider and ongoing conversation. We aim to provide a platform that experts in the field can use to launch further work on critical race studies. We will amplify their voices in support of more equitable research agendas for a more inclusive future.

To follow this conversation onTwitter, use #FolgerCRC