Description

RaceB4Race is an ongoing conference series and professional network community by and for scholars of color working on issues of race and structural racism in premodern literature, history, religion, and culture. Launched in January 2019, RaceB4Race centers the expertise, perspectives, and sociopolitical interests of BIPOC scholars whose work expands critical race theory. The project is the brainchild of Ayanna Thompson, a Regents Professor of English at Arizona State University, and the Director of the Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies. It emerged after the International Congress of Medieval Studies rejected a set of proposals for sessions on race and antiracism by Medievalists of Color.
Last year, the Mellon Foundation awarded a major new grant to support its work. The grant from Mellon will provide funding for staff, postdoctoral fellows, predoctoral fellows, and undergraduates, allowing RaceB4Race to create a full spectrum of premodern critical race studies content for use in higher education, and seeking to change the way scholars and graduate students are mentored in premodern critical race studies. RaceB4Race will also support the development of premodern critical race scholars as public intellectuals, and train scholars and fellows in digital, personal, and institutional safety, as it encourages their public-facing work.
While the RB4R symposia have been ground-breaking and influential, and the Mellon grant will be catalytic, Thompson and her colleagues are eager to expand participation and to pivot to focus further on the public circulation of ideas. The seminar to be supported by this special Luce grant, with additional funding from the Hitz Foundation and ASU, will involve discussion, design, and workshopping intended to culminate in collaborative public-facing projects whose aim is to get premodern critical race studies research into wider public circulation. Scholars of religion will be featured importantly in the seminar cohort, led by Thompson and her ASU colleague Miguel Aguilera, whose scholarship concentrates on religious studies, sociocultural anthropology, ethnography, material culture, and archaeology focusing on Indigenous epistemologies within early modern Latin America. 
Through its recent RFP for projects aiming to advance public knowledge on race, justice and religion in America, along with a range of related responsive grants, the Religion and Theology Program is seeking to bring attention to race and justice more centrally and substantially into the heart of its work. This project dovetails with these efforts, extends the program’s intellectual networks in new directions, and aligns with its ongoing focus on the cultivation of creative public-facing scholarship.