Bringing conversations about religious conversion into the classroom can help students see that religion was—and still is for some—more than just about what a person thinks and believes.

“Merciless Beauty” is a poem written in a late 14th-century English that may or may not be Chaucer’s but is highly comparable to Chaucer’s usage. Reading the poem alongside the film The Prison in 12 Landscapes, students are asked to make connections between the poem and the film and their formal examinations of time, incarceration, and repetition.

Politics and myths like the curse of Ham are natural allies in creating an ideology and moral justification for discrimination, enslavement, and colonial oppression.