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

Junior, Nyasha. Reimagining Hagar: Blackness and Bible. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019.

Investigates the conceptualization of the Biblical figure of Hagar in 19th and 20th century American literature, with specific reference to portrayals of Hagar as Black. Following an overview of premodern portrayals of Hagar in Christian, Jewish, and Muslim contexts, the book uses contemporary treatments of Hagar as a marker for broader cultural conversations about gender, race, slavery, abolition, and other themes. It engages discussions in the study of Christianity, Black history, and literary history.

Ancient
Literature

Kabir, Ananya Jahanara and Deanne Williams, eds. Postcolonial Approaches to the European Middle Ages: Translating Cultures. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005.

A collection of essays engaging the intersection between medieval and postcolonial studies. The essays build upon prior approaches to the same entanglement while shifting focus onto approaches in translation, codicology, and material culture across a range of medieval European contexts. The works together participate in a range of conversations, notably on the study of Orientalism, connected histories, and postcolonial studies.

Medieval
History

Kao, Wan-Chuan. White Before Whiteness in the Late Middle Ages. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2024.

Considers premodern whiteness through the frames of fragility, precarity, and raciality. Kao argues for the instability of whiteness as a social and biopolitical category. The text explores the nuances of whiteness as understood through animate and inanimate objects and argues that whiteness should be seen as operational. This work engages in premodern critical whiteness studies, trans*studies, biopolitics, and more.

Early Modern
History

Kaplan, M. Lindsay. “Jessica’s Mother: Medieval Constructions of Jewish Race and Gender in The Merchant of Venice.” Shakespeare Quarterly 58, no. 1 (2007): 1-30.

Examines the connections between medieval and early modern English ideas about Jewish racial identity, with specific reference to Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice and the character of Leah. The article focuses on gendered representations of the Jewish race and how the figure of the Jewish woman interfaced with Christian ideas about necessary racial inferiority and necessary conversion. The work is of interest to studies in English literature, Jewish studies, and Shakespeare.

Early Modern
Religious Studies

Kaplan, M. Lindsay. Figuring Racism in Medieval Christianity. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018.

Examines the intersection of Christian theology and racial difference in medieval European Christian cultures. The book presents an argument about how the Christian notion of servitus Judaeorum (Jewish servitude) prefigured Christian dominance over racialized non-Christian others and teases out the linkages between premodern and contemporary forms of Christian racism. It engages arguments in the study of religion, embodiment, and anti-Semitism.

Medieval
Religious Studies

Karamustafa, Ali Aydin. “Who Were the Türkmen of Ottoman and Safavid Lands? An Overlooked Early Modern Identity.” Der Islam (Berlin) 97, no. 2 (2020): 476–99.

Study of the term Türkmen in medieval and early modern western Asia, with special attention to how its definitions excavate the history of largely rural nomads. The article investigates how the term was used to articulate resistance to Anatolian and Iranian imperial orders after the 16th century. Of interest to students of history, Islamic studies, and Middle East studies.

Medieval
History

Karim-Cooper, Farah. “Emotions, Gesture, and Race in the Early Modern Playhouse.” In Playing and Playgoing in Early Modern England: Actor, Audience, and Performance, edited by Simon Smith and Emma Whipday, 57-76. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022.

Examines the kinetic exchanges between actors and audiences in Shakespeare’s work, with specific reference to early modern performances of Othello. The essay demonstrates how bodily movements, hand gestures, and facial expressions constitute significant loci for theorizing the relationship between audience and actors. It argues for an understanding of such phenomena through the lens of critical race theory. The work engages conversations in the study of Shakespeare, Blackness, and performance studies.

Early Modern
Literature

Karim-Cooper, Farah. The Great White Bard: How to Love Shakespeare While Talking about Race. New York: Viking, 2023.

A study of racial formation in the plays of Shakespeare, inviting readers to engage critically with Shakespeare’s legacy so that it might both reveal key components of today’s racialized power structures and be purposed towards present justice. The book draws upon numerous texts—including Titus Andronicus, Antony and Cleopatra, Othello, The Merchant of Venice, and The Tempest—to consider how racial identities were created in early modern England. Accessible to general audiences and of interest to students of English, Shakespeare studies, performance studies, and beyond.

Early Modern
Literature

Khanmohamadi, Shirin A. In Light of Another’s Word: European Ethnography in the Middle Ages. Philadelphia: The University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014.

Studies moments of self-conscious reflection by medieval European authors during encounters with religious and cultural outsiders. The book argues for the existence of a distinctive medieval “ethnographic poetics” characterized by an openness to distinct perspectives, attention to limits, and discomfort (without suggesting a necessary ethos of European multiculturalism). This work is of interest to students of medieval studies, European literature, and Orientalism.

Medieval
Religious Studies

Kim, Dorothy ed. "Special Issue: Critical Race and the Middle Ages." Literature Compass 16, no. 9-10 (2019).

Special issue on medieval race scholarship that follows Margo Hendricks’ call for a premodern critical race scholarship that acknowledges its genealogies. The contributions examine academic practices in literature and history on the Middle Ages. They address racialization, Eurocentrism, representation, and settler colonialism.

Medieval

Kim, Dorothy and Ayanna Thompson, eds. "Special Issue: Race Before Race: Premodern Critical Race Studies." Literature Compass 18, no. 10 (2021).

This special issue stems from the inaugural RaceB4Race symposium in 2019. Employing a variety of theoretical, methodological, and pedagogical lenses, the essays in this volume critically examine how premodern critical race scholars function as activists in their fields and communities.

Literature

Lalla, Barbara. Postcolonialism: Caribbean Rereading of Medieval English Discourse. Kingston: University of West Indies Press, 2008.

Interrogates the development of medieval English discourse through a theoretical framing of Caribbean literary history. The book interrogates the ways in which medieval considerations of sociopolitical ills, such as an ambience of iniquity, led to a specific poetics of medieval English as a language expressing popular struggle. The work engages multiple conversations in postcolonial theory, literary theory, vernacularization, and historiography. Lalla makes critical interventions on the theoretical plane, reversing prevalent theoretical-historiographical lenses to better adjudicate an English context from a postcolonial context.

Medieval
Literature

LaPerle, Carol Mejia, ed. Race and Affect in Early Modern English Literature. Tempe: ACMRS Press, 2022.

By putting critical race studies into conversation with affect theory, this collection addresses the emotional impacts of racial formation and racist ideologies in early modern literature. The collected essays analyze racial processes as visceral, affective experiences, reading and interpreting literary tradition, religion, gender, class, sexuality, and social identity through investigations of how race feels.

Early Modern
Literature

Lee, Christina H. The Anxiety of Sameness in Early Modern Spain. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015.

This book explores Spanish elite’s obsession with “passing” racially and socially during the 16th and 17th centuries. Lee writes about how Conversos (converted Jews) and Moriscos (converted Muslims) could pass for ‘pure’ Christians, which brought anxiety to Spaniards. She argues that the dominant Spanish identity fears the arbitrariness that separates them from the undesirables of society can therefore be recognized as sameness.

Early Modern
Literature

Liew, Tat-siong Benny. What Is Asian American Biblical Hermeneutics? Reading the New Testament. Hawai'i: University of Hawai'i Press, 2008.

This book focuses on the major genres of the New Testament with an Asian American biblical interpretation between 5th century BCE and 5th century CE. It brings together two studies, Asian American studies and biblical studies. Liew evaluates presence and agency of Asian Americans within the field of biblical hermeneutics.

Ancient
Literature

Lipski, John. A History of Afro-Hispanic Language: Five Centuries, Five Continents. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005.

Examines speech varieties used by Afro-Hispanics from the 15th century to the 19th century in Iberia and Europe’s New World colonies to evaluate influences that shaped the development of Spanish on four continents. From a comparative historical perspective, this study traces the first attestations of Africans learning Spanish and the study of literary documents. He separates legitimate forms of Afro-Hispanic expression from those that result from racist stereotyping to assess how contact with the African diaspora has had a permanent impact on contemporary Spanish.

Early Modern

Little Jr., Arthur L., ed. White People in Shakespeare: Essays on Race, Culture, and the Elite. London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2023.

A collection of essays examining how the works of Shakespeare configure whiteness, intervening in common framings of Shakespeare’s “race” plays to demonstrate that all of Shakespeare’s plays are about race. The essays together perform a critical intervention by illuminating the ways in which whiteness remains an unstated normative fixture within the study of Shakespeare and beyond. The volume regards both the conceptualizations of whiteness within Shakespeare’s early modern works and the reception of Shakespeare among white readers in contemporary settings.

Early Modern
Literature

Little, Jr., Arthur L. Shakespeare Jungle Fever: National-Imperial Re-Visions of Race, Rape, and Sacrifice. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002.

Examines the subject of interracial sex in the works of Shakespeare, attending specifically to narratives of rape. The book is anchored by close readings of Titus Andronicus, Othello, Antony and Cleopatra, and The Rape of Lucrece—as well as surrounding materials—to excavate rhetorical strategies of whiteness and masculinity being deployed in early modern England. It engages conversations in the study of Shakespeare, gender studies, the study of sexuality, and English literature.

Early Modern
Literature

Lomuto, Sierra. "Special Issue: The Medieval Undone: Imagining a New Global Past." boundary 2 50, no. 3 (2023).

Special issue exploring the limitations of the category “medieval” in formulating knowledge production. Essays explore the limits of “medieval” as a historiographical category, the role of publishers in challenging and upholding current institutional structures, the borders and politics of periodization, and the potential of theoretical approaches often excluded from the study of the “medieval.”

Medieval

Lomuto, Sierra. “Tensions of Geography: Orientalism in the Man of Law’s Tale and Floris and Blancheflour.” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 55, no. 3 (September 2025): 419-438.

Utilizes theories of orientalism to reveal the cultural work of mid- to late-14th-century romances. Lomuto considers the relationship between geography and religious identity. The article argues that geographic ambiguity and religious mobility inform racializing practices, which result from unstable boundaries rather than fixed oppositions. This work is of interest to students of orientalism, geography, and religious studies.

Early Modern
Literature
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