Goodbye 2022, hello 2023!
Hello and Happy New Year from the Medicine and the Making of Race team! In this news item we look back at a productive year for the project, and ahead to some exciting things to come in 2023.
In May 2022 we held our project’s opening conference ‘Race and the Early Modern: New Scholars, New Scholarship’. This one-day event featured new work by early career scholars across five thought-provoking panels. Huge thanks to all our speakers, whose papers provoked rich discussions. Thanks also to the conference’s two key notes, Surekha Davies and Nick Jones. Surekha’s inspiring keynote lecture set the tone for engagement and cross-disciplinary discussions for the entire day, and Nick Jones’s talk, chaired by the brilliant Herman Bennett, provided a profound ending to an intense day filled with excellent papers and discussions.
We were also so pleased to welcome Jennifer Morgan, whose public symposium ‘Reckoning with Slavery’ provided a brilliant prelude the night before our conference. Discussion by Zoltan Biedermann and Laura Gowing helped open up the themes of Prof Morgan’s inspirational recent book, which continues to influence our work.
Many of the conversations from May continued over MMoR’s three panels at RSA Virtual in December, at which we were pleased to see familiar faces and meet new interlocutors. We’re grateful to all who participated, and we hope to see this community grow over the next two years.
In October we hosted a public roundtable for Black History Month on The History of Black Political Thought, for which we were joined by Professor Tommy Curry of Edinburgh University, Kesewa John, Richard Drayton, and Dalitso Ruwe.
Throughout the year our London’s Records of Slavery network continued to meet on a regular basis. This network connects academic researchers with archivists, librarians and curators across private and cultural sectors to explore work on institutional links with the historical slave trade. Each meeting featured thought-provoking presentations from some fantastic speakers, including network members as well as external guest speakers.
Our year closed with a one-day workshop on London's Sources for Slavery in December. Despite a last-minute switch to hybrid format due to a flurry of festive weather, the day was a great success and we were so grateful to all those who joined, particularly those who battled through the snow! Special thanks to Prof Simon Newman who presented a fascinating keynote.
In team news, we welcomed two new project members. Dr Carolin Schmitz joined in January. Her research on enslaved and free Black women healers in the Canaries and the broader Iberian Atlantic has already steered the project in new and exciting directions. In October, Eli Cumings completed the MMoR team. We were so impressed by Eli’s paper at our opening conference in May and couldn’t be happier to welcome her as a Research Associate. Eli is a literary scholar and cultural historian whose work explores the representation and interpretation of human difference in early modern texts. She joins us from Cambridge University where she is currently finishing up her doctoral project.
Looking ahead to the coming year, we have some exciting events on the horizon. We’re kicking off the new year with a reading group with Tamar Herzog (Harvard University) on the 17th January, in which we’ll be exploring mobilities of Black lives in the Iberian Atlantic.
Hannah will be heading to RSA San Juan in March where she will chair a panel on Skin in the Renaissance world and present on apothecaries’ jars.
In April we look forward to welcoming Cécile Fromont for an exploratory workshop on ‘’Bundles": Empowered Packets in the Early Modern Atlantic World”. The workshop will bring together an interdisciplinary group of scholars with knowledge and expertise of “early modern bundles” and their many uses and forms throughout the Atlantic.
In July we will be holding the ‘Archives, Slavery & Race-Making Summer School’: a week-long summer school exploring new methodological approaches to the archives of race & slavery in the early modern world. Featuring faculty experts Diana Paton, Tamara Walker, Stephanie Smallwood, Alexandre White and King’s own Farah Karim-Cooper, this promises to be a highlight of the project. A call for participants is now live!
In September, MMoR will hold an interdisciplinary conference exploring the relationship between Christianity and race-making in the early modern world. A call for papers is now live! We look forward very much to taking a look at the proposals.
Our main publication goals for this year are twofold. We are working with collaborators on a special issue on Slavery, Medicine and Race-Making in the Early Modern Atlantic World. We are also launching a new blog series this year on Sources for Medicine, Slavery and Race, which will appear on our website from Spring. Keep your eyes peeled.
We hope this year will bring many opportunities to meet more of you in person and across various means and modes; we look forward to continued exchange and collaboration.