Holiday Wishes and the Year Ahead
As we wind down the clock on 2024, we are looking ahead to the final phase of this four-year funded project, due to end in September 2025.
Highlights have been covered in previous updates, but this was a year full of events, bringing together experts and distinguished visitors from near and far, including Urvashi Chakravarty, Julie Hardwicke, Jennifer Morgan, Natalya Din Kariucki, Katherine McKittrick, Eva Johanna Holmberg, Andrew Hadfield, Joe daCosta, Zoltán Biedermann, Kevin Killeen, Katherine Paugh, and Hanh Bui. This is first and foremost a project about community building and subject formation. We are so grateful to those who travel to visit us, and who give up their time to share ideas and expertise generously.
Of course, it’s also a project about research, and this year our most exciting project trip was to the Archivo General de Indias in Seville in October. This was an incredibly productive stay, yielding 4000 photographs and some fascinating archival findings. We are especially grateful to local experts, Manuel Francisco Fernández Chaves and Eduardo Corona Pérez for help and hospitality. Some of the results of this trip have already made their way into seminar papers given by Hannah in Cambridge, the Huntingdon Library (Los Angeles) and the University of California, Berkeley, and by Carolin Schmitz to the Early Modern Workshop in Cambridge.
One of the most pleasing aspects of a long-running project is seeing research come to fruition. In a delightfully symmetrical development, this academic year our two keynote speakers from our opening conference on Race and Early Modernity publish their books within months of each other.
Cervantine Blackness appeared this Autumn, written by Nicholas R. Jones, who gave his conference keynote lecture on the same topic. For those of us who learned from and with Jones’ first book, Staging Habla de Negros, Cervantine Blackness is an avowedly ‘perturbing’ read, a daring re-situation of his earlier expertise in a far more theoretical mould. For me, it was a book which in some senses profoundly challenged the implications of scholarship on enslavement, but in other ways offered an invigorating defence of scholarly reading practices. There are methodological implications from this text for all early modernists, and I am excited to follow the scholarly conversation it is sure to provoke.
Surekha Davies has been a longtime friend of this project, speaking alongside Jones in our first conference on the subject of costume books. Her forthcoming book, Humans: A Monstrous History, will appear in February 2025 with the University of California Press. Building on Surekha’s influential work on Renaissance cartography, monstrosity and race-making, Monsters (you mean ‘Humans’?) explores the longer durée role of ‘monstrosity’ in shaping what we think to be human. This is a high-profile trade publication, which should see intersections between history, race, and medicine newly in the public eye. We’ll be welcoming Surekha to King’s to introduce the book on April 28th – something to look out for!
We are also incredibly excited to see the recent publication of our London friend and colleague Chloe Ireton’s Slavery and Freedom in Black Thought in the Early Spanish Atlantic. Chloe is a historian in UCL, and those of you who have attended project events are likely to have met her – she has always shared her expertise generously, as interlocutor, and frequent chair. This is an eagerly-awaited book which brings to light a dizzying array of little known sources, and I know many of you will be reading it over the year ahead.
Our own publication efforts continue, with work currently under review, including a special issue arising from the conference Race and Christianity efficiently edited by Eli Cumings, and a longer-gestating special issue on Medicine, Slavery, and Race-making. We hope that 2025 will see these reach a wider audience.
Keep an eye out for a new series of our blog, coming in Spring, with posts from, among others: Lexi Cook, Claudia Geremia, Halle-Mackenzie Ashby, Adam Brigden, Akosua Paries-Osei and Michael Aidan Pope.
Finally, forthcoming events include two major conferences. Following a workshop on seventeenth-century Barbados wills last year, we are in the early stages of planning a conference on Barbados organised with Misha Ewan and Michael Bennett, to take place in June. Details will follow in the New Year.
We are also incredibly excited to announce the capstone conference for the project, Medicine, Slavery, and Race-Making, which will take place 15-17 May. Confirmed speakers include Sasha Turner, Suman Seth, Kevin Siena, Mary Hicks, Sarah-Maria Schober, Claire Weeda, Zachary Dorner, Melissa Reynolds, and more. We will also be inviting submissions to this conference. A CFP, further details, and registration information will come in the New Year.
A final note that our calendar always looks busy, but many of the highlights in past years have been ad-hoc, informal, and responsive. We are keen that this project be of use to a broader community, and so as always, we invite suggestions for events that serve the scholarly needs of those working in related fields. Bring us your ideas! We hope to see you in person or virtually over the year ahead. If we don’t, we wish you a peaceful and productive 2025.
Hannah, Carolin and Becca.