Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies
Engage the past, define the future.
Our mission is to enable and promote the most expansive, creative, and daring scholarship in medieval and renaissance studies. We do this not only by fostering a vibrant intellectual community for the faculty at our three universities, but also by publishing forward-looking, vanguard research through our in-house press. ACMRS promotes work that is historically grounded and theoretically expansive, with the aim of advancing dialogues that reach into the present moment and point us to different, more inclusive, futures.
RaceB4Race™ symposia
RaceB4Race is an ongoing conference series and professional network community by and for scholars of color working on issues of race in premodern literature, history, and culture. RaceB4Race centers the expertise, perspectives, and sociopolitical interests of BIPOC scholars, whose work seeks to expand critical race theory.
Bridging many traditional disciplinary divides, RaceB4Race not only creates innovative scholarly dialogues, but also fosters social change within premodern studies as a whole.
ACMRS Press
ACMRS Press publishes the most forward-looking, vanguard research in medieval and renaissance studies. Our publications include projects that are historically grounded and theoretically expansive, with the aim of fostering dialogues that reach into the present moment and point us to different, more inclusive, futures.
Awards and opportunities
The Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies offers a variety of resources for faculty members, graduate students, undergraduate students, and independent scholars in Arizona and beyond. Our support of premodern scholarship ranges from residencies, travel funding, publications, and more.
The Sundial
A digital publication of the Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies.
“Houston, we have a problem:” Erasing Black Scholars in Old English Literature
by Mary Rambaran-Olm | March, 2020
Medievalists have been interrogating the history of the field, how it is structured, and, in recent years, querying the field’s survival in academia. Like most other disciplines, medieval studies is infected with racism...
Decolonizing Shakespeare? Toward an Antiracist, Culturally Sustaining Praxis
by Katherine Gillen and Lisa Jennings | November, 2019
Activists and students have called on us to decolonize our syllabi and the university more broadly. Students at Yale, for example, insisted that the English department decolonize rather than simply diversify its curriculum, denouncing professors...
Shakespeare and Your Mountainish Inhumanity
by Ruben Espinosa | August, 2019
The privately funded border wall erected along a half-mile of mountainous terrain on the U.S. Mexico border near El Paso, Texas does not look so much like an open wound as it does something cleanly sutured...
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