An act of scholarly justice

When the International Congress of Medieval Studies rejected a set of proposals for sessions on race and antiracism by Medievalists of Color, Ayanna Thompson responded by creating an alternative conference series to build professional community by and for scholars of color working on issues of race in premodern literature, history, and culture.

RaceB4Race hosts two conferences a year. Thanks to baseline funding from Arizona State University and the Hitz Foundation, and event specific funding from partners such as the Folger Shakespeare Library, all events have been free and open to the public.

Consequently, RaceB4Race draws audiences of academic and community members in the hundreds. RaceB4Race has had significant impact already, but the RaceB4Race team aims to not only change the scholarly field, but also change the ways teachers and creatives/arts professionals help society imagine the past.

A seismic shift in the field

When the first RaceB4Race symposium was planned, Thompson imagined a small room with twenty or thirty people engaged in dialogues about premodern critical race studies. However, on the first day of the symposium, RaceB4Race had three hundred registrants—undergraduate students, faculty, university staff, graduate students, community college students, high school teachers, administrators, artists, and members of the community. By creating a space to engage with premodern critical race studies, RaceB4Race fulfilled a long unmet need.

Since then, RaceB4Race has secured funding for five years of programming at ASU and partner institutions, nationally and internationally. RaceB4Race expands its reach, with a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, to focus on curricular development, field diversification, academic mentorship, and public humanities work around race in premodern humanities fields.

RaceB4Race challenges scholars of premodern studies everywhere to acknowledge race as a lens for investigation, to support scholars of color, and to address the systemic inequality in their universities and institutions.