Selected annotated 
bibliography of PCRS

This bibliography represents a selection of foundational texts in the field of premodern critical race studies (PCRS). It focuses on secondary sources examining premodern race and how constructions of difference in the past continue to reverberate today. While these entries treat a variety of sociohistorical and linguistic contexts, the studies themselves covered here are all produced in English. This is a continuously expanding document created by the ACMRS Postdoctoral Research Scholars in collaboration with the RaceB4Race Executive Board.

Period
Discipline

Calkin, Siobhain Bly. “Marking Religion on the Body: Saracens, Categorization, and the King of Tars.” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 104, no. 2 (2005): 219–38.

Explores anxieties about racial typologizing and miscegenation through a 14th century English romance. The essay argues that the romance in question, The King of Tars, engineers scenarios in which characters’ racial and religious identities are subject to ambiguity or failed categorizations, which in turn demands somatic transformations within the narrative itself to provide clarity. The work engages discussions in the fields of conversion, typology, and medieval English literature.

Medieval
Literature

Cawsey, Kathy. "Disorienting Orientalism: Finding Saracens in Strange Places in Late Medieval English Manuscripts." Exemplaria 21, no. 4 (2009): 380–397.

Examines the parallelism drawn between “Vikings” and “Saracens” in medieval English literature and visual arts. The essay argues that the figures of non-Christian Anglo-Saxons and “Saracens” operated in parallel fashion until the 14th century, at which point new consolidations of English identity rendered the comparison untenable. It engages discussions in the study of Christianity, conversion, and English literature.

Medieval
Literature

Chaganti, Seeta. "Dance, Institution, Abolition." Postmedieval: A Journal of Medieval Cultural Studies 14, no. 2 (2023) 267-289.

Examines the connections between antiracism in medieval studies and the abolition of the prison-industrial complex. The essay argues that the study of medieval dance requires certain capacities to prison abolitionist work: “1) an ability to envision what we cannot know; 2) an understanding of how to act collectively even through our estrangement from each other (as medieval dancers did); 3) a willingness to take risks.”

Medieval
Literature

Chakravarty, Urvashi. “Race, Natality, and the Biopolitics of Early Modern Political Theology.” Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 18, no. 2 (2018): 140–166.

Examining England in the 16th and 17th centuries, this article analyzes the concept of natality in three Shakespearean dramas (Titus Andronicus, The Merchant of Venice, and Othello) to identify racial formations within early modern political theology. Chakravarty articulates a prehistory of slavery by arguing that birth, bloodline, and bodily difference function as biopolitical mechanisms that racialize populations and reshape sovereignty.

Early Modern
Literature
Shakespeare

Chakravarty, Urvashi. Fictions of Consent: Slavery, Servitude, and Free Service in Early Modern England. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2022.

Analyzes slavery in 16th and 17th century England against the widely held conception of early modern England as possessing a culture of voluntary service. The book focuses on the slippery “border between service and servitude” in order to parse the rhetorical techniques inflecting the lives of servants, captives, and others in early modern English contexts. The work engages conversations in the histories of labor, drama, and early modern England.

Early Modern
Literature

Chapman, Matthieu. Anti-Black Racism in Early Modern English Drama: The Other “Other.” London: Routledge, 2018.

Study of anti-Blackness at work in early modern England. Drawing upon English dramas as evidence, the book argues that the early modern English placed Black Africans outside the scope of humanity as a key facet of constructing not only their own humanity, but that of non-Black “Others” as well. This book is likely to be of interest to students of English, Shakespeare studies, Black studies.

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Early Modern
Literature

Chapman, Matthieu and Wainwright, Anna, eds. Teaching Race in the European Renaissance: A Classroom Guide. Tempe: ACMRS Press, 2023.

Compendium of pedagogical resources to facilitate teaching on race in early modern European contexts, with a focus on the “Renaissance” era in England, France, Italy, the Iberian Peninsula, and the Americas. The volume brings together engagements with a variety of material including dramas, fairy tales, visual arts, poetry, and historical writing. The chapters consider a variety of fields including performance studies, art history, literature, and digital humanities.

Early Modern
Literature

Cohen, Jeffrey J. "Race." In A Handbook of Middle English Studies, edited by Marion Turner, 109–122. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013.

Investigates theories of race in medieval English works. Through analysis of complex literary events, such as the battle between the knight Guy and the giant Colbrond in Guy of Warwick, the essay encapsulates the significance of “religion, descent, custom, law, language, monstrosity, geographical origin, and species” in addition to somatic markers in medieval English constructions of race. In addition, the essay provides a historiographical overview of contemporary thinking on race and medieval studies. Engages conversations in historiography, literature, embodiment, and religious studies.

Medieval
History

Cohen, Jeffrey J., ed. The Postcolonial Middle Ages. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2000.

A compendium of essays addressing multifaceted temporalities of the medieval and its possible resonances today, with particular attention to postcolonial hermeneutics of medieval materials. The essays range across themes such as Richard the Lionheart, statues of Dante and Joan of Arc in Malcolm X Park, Chaucer, Prester John, and others. The volume engages conversations in the fields of postcolonial theory, historiography, and temporality.

Medieval
Literature

Coles, Kimberly A., and Dorothy Kim, eds. A Cultural History of Race in the Renaissance and Early Modern Age (1350–1550). London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2021.

A compendium of essays reimagining European history between 1350 and 1550 through the experiences of "Black Africans, Asians, Jews, and Muslims." The essays explore the intersection of race with environment, religion, science, politics, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and more in a range of Renaissance and early modern European contexts.

Medieval
History

Coles, Kimberly Anne, and Dorothy Kim, eds. A Cultural History of Race in the Renaissance and Early Modern Age. London: Bloomsbury, 2023.

Decentering Europe and emphasizing global connections in the 15th through 17th centuries, this volume brings together essays that trace racial ideas that emerge across literature, art, law, and science. The collected essays reconsider the European Renaissance and early modern periods and the awareness and violence that interactions across cultures brought. It argues that ideas of race develop through intersecting cultural practices and social hierarchies that marginalize those perceived as different.

Early Modern
Literature
Intro to premodern critical race studies

Coodin, Sara. “Conversion Interrupted: Shame and the Demarcation of Jewish Women’s Difference in The Merchant of Venice.” In Race and Affect in Early Modern English Literature, edited by Carol Mejia LaPerle. 79-98. Tempe: ACMRS Press, 2022.

An examination of constructing Jewish racial difference in Shakespeare's late 16th century play The Merchant of Venice. Coodin argues that the psychic and affective details placed onto a female Jewish character—namely, religious self-loathing and shame—are critical devices by which female Jews were racialized; and that these details were shown to be factors in Christian theorizations of conversion. The article engages conversations in the study of religion, Judaism, the history of emotion, and early modern Europe.

Early Modern
Religious Studies

Corredera, Vanessa I. “‘How Dey Goin’ to Kill Othello?!’ Key & Peele and Shakespearean Universality.” Journal of American Studies 54, no. 1 (2020): 27–35.

Investigates the question of Shakespeare’s universality through the lens of a 21st-century comedic sketch by Key and Peele. Through a close reading of the sketch, Corredera demonstrates how Key and Peele both gesture towards the limits of Shakespearean universality and consider the representation of Black masculinity more broadly. This essay is of interest to students of Shakespeare, Blackness, and English literature.

Early Modern
Literature

Corredera, Vanessa I. "‘Not a Moor Exactly’: Shakespeare, Serial, and Modern Constructions of Race." Shakespeare Quarterly 67, no. 1 (2016): 30-50.

This article pairs the podcast Serial and Shakespeare’s Othello to illustrate how to discuss productively the fluidity of race in the early modern period and in contemporary society. Corredera suggests that recognizing the fluidity of racial categories can benefit current research and pedagogical methods. The essay pays particular attention to popular culture, social justice, religion, and the literary “canon.”

Early Modern
Literature

Corredera, Vanessa I. Reanimating Shakespeare’s Othello in Post-Racial America. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2022.

Study of representations of Shakespeare’s Othello in the United States between 2008 and 2016. The book analyzes literary and audiovisual materials alongside performances to demonstrate how the new adaptations of the play accomplish both racist and antiracist ends. Of interest to students of English, Shakespeare studies, Black studies, and American history.

Early Modern
Literature

Corredera, Vanessa I. Reanimating Shakespeare’s Othello in Post-Racial America. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2022.

Examining the United States in the 21st century, particularly 2008–2016, this book analyzes adaptations and appropriations of Othello across film, television, performance, and digital media. It argues that these reanimations create competing racial frameworks, sustaining both antiblack and antiracist narratives while challenging claims of a “post-racial” society. Corredera offers guidance for wrestling with contemporary intersections between Shakespeare and race in scholarship and the classroom.

Early Modern
Literature
Shakespeare

Couloute, Janet. “The Construction of Whiteness, Gender and Race in Early Modern Portraits.” Tate Papers no. 36 (2025).

Examines constructed whiteness in three late 16th and early 17th century paintings in the Tate Britain collection, portraits for which Couloute serves as gallery guide. This Tate paper argues that the depiction of skin tone, dress, cosmetics, and heraldry in portraiture evidence English nation-building, colonialism, and identity through inheritance. The scholarship is of interest to students of art history and portraiture, constructions of whiteness, and gender studies.

Early Modern
Art History

Dadabhoy, Ambereen. “‘Othello Was a Lie’: Wrestling with Shakespeare’s Othello.” In Shakespeare and Cultural Appropriation, eds. Vanessa I. Corredera, L. Monique Pittman, and Geoffrey Way, 94-111. London: Routledge, 2023.

A study of how Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North constructs relationships to Shakespeare’s Othello. The article showcases the novel’s “oppositional appropriation” of Othello by sharply delineating the limitations of the play, forcing readers to attend to persons and places not engaged by Shakespeare. Of interest to students of English, postcolonial studies, Shakespeare studies, and Middle Eastern studies.

Early Modern
Literature

Dadabhoy, Ambereen. Shakespeare Through Islamic Worlds. Oxford: Routledge, 2024.

A study of the peripheralization of Islam and Muslims in the plays of Shakespeare, contrasted with the more evident presence of Islamic material in the works of Shakespeare’s contemporaries. The work argues that Shakespeare erases Islam to construct a fantasy of white, European, Christian dominance in the Mediterranean. Of interest to students of English, Shakespeare studies, and the study of the Mediterranean.

Early Modern
Literature

Dadabhoy, Ambereen. "Wincing at Shakespeare: Looking B(l)Ack at the Bard." Journal of American Studies 54, no. 1 (2020): 82-8.

This article investigates Keith Hamilton Cobb’s interrogation of representations of Black identity in Shakespeare. Beginning with W.E.B. Du Bois, this text traces Black intellectual involvement with Shakespeare, suggesting that ambivalence allows Black artists to engage with Shakespeare and challenge white contemporary culture. The article covers issues such as casting, performance, and literary studies.

Early Modern
Literature
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