The Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, with funding from the Mellon Foundation, aims to expand curricular development, field diversification, academic mentorship, and public humanities work around race in premodern humanities fields. From that initial vision, we created Throughlines, a free online pedagogical resource for educators who want to bring conversations about race into their college classrooms.

Directed by Ayanna Thompson and Ruben Espinosa, and created by a team of educators, content creators, and creative professionals at the Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, Throughlines is the only resource of its kind.

What is premodern critical race studies?

Premodern critical race studies is an historically grounded and theoretically expansive field of study that considers nascent formations of race—from the ancient to the early modern, and from diverse histories, geographies, and cultures. The field underscores how studying this form of race-making in the past is vital to understanding the present moment. By considering the histories of racial formations, premodern critical race studies aims to address the systemic inequalities within our modern world as a means of supporting antiracist structures and inclusive futures.

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Where we come from

RaceB4Race started at the Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies in 2019 as a small research symposium by and for BIPOC scholars working in premodern critical race studies. Now, RaceB4Race is a wide-reaching community of scholars, students, researchers, theater practitioners, curators, librarians, artists, and activists who are looking to the past to imagine different, more inclusive futures.  

While decades of scholarship and pedagogy have gone into the field of premodern critical race studies, RaceB4Race brought light to a critical viewpoint that had gone largely ignored by traditional scholars of premodern studies. Discussions of race and race-making are a necessary part of studying the past—its histories, its cultures, its literatures—and are vital to understanding the issues of our present moment.  

Throughlines was created as an expansion of RaceB4Race. Our goal is to support educators in bringing these conversations into their classrooms, to point them towards leading scholarship and pedagogical methods, and to offer new ways of engaging students in discussions of race and its nascent formations.