RaceB4Race curricula development

Brandi Adams is an assistant professor in the Department of English and member of the Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies. Her interests include book history, history of reading, early modern English drama, and premodern critical race and gender studies. Having formerly served as an undergraduate program manager at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, she also researches the early history of artificial intelligence, early modern automata and how studying literature can have a significant and positive impact on computing.

Leslie Alexander is the Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Professor of History at Rutgers University. A specialist in early African American and African Diaspora history, she is the author of African or American?: Black Identity and Political Activism in New York City, 1784-1861, Fear of a Black Republic: Haiti and the Birth of Black Internationalism in the United States and is the co-editor of three additional volumes. Her current research examines how surveillance of free and enslaved Black communities in the colonial and antebellum eras laid the foundation for modern-day policing. A three-time Ford Foundation fellowship recipient, Alexander is the immediate Past President of the Association for the Study of the Worldwide African Diaspora (ASWAD) and serves on the Advisory Councils for the National Council for Black Studies, the Journal of African American History, Black Perspectives, The Black Scholar, and the Montpelier Foundation Board.

Chouki El Hamel is a professor of history in the School of Historical, Philosophical and Religious Studies at Arizona State University, specializing in West and Northwest Africa. He was a scholar in residence at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in New York City. He is an Africanist scholar who is particularly interested in the subaltern relationship of servile and marginalized communities to Islamic ruling institutions. His research into these relationships revolves around issues of slavery, race/ethnicity/color, gender, power/class, and restorative justice. He published two books and many scholarly articles in academic journals and popular magazines. His interviews, commentaries and essays have appeared in international venues such as the French newspaper Le Monde, the German magazine Bilatéral, the Moroccan magazines Zamane and TelQuel, and Jadaliyya from the Arab Studies Institute in the US. His most recent book, Black Morocco: A History of Slavery, Race, and Islam (Cambridge University Press, 2013) was translated into French in 2019. He is now working on a new book project entitled The Hidden Story of Maroons in Morocco.

Ruben Espinosa is Associate Professor of English at Arizona State University and Associate Director of the Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies. He is the author of Shakespeare on the Shades of Racism (2021), Masculinity and Marian Efficacy in Shakespeare’s England (2011), and co-editor of Shakespeare and Immigration (2014). He was a Trustee of the Shakespeare Association of America (2018-2021), and he serves on the Editorial Boards of Shakespeare Quarterly, Exemplaria: Medieval, Early Modern, Theory, and Palgrave’s “Early Modern Cultural Studies” series. He is currently at work on his next monograph, Shakespeare on the Border: Language, Legitimacy and La Frontera.

Mariam Galarrita is a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of English and member of the Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies. Galarrita’s research focuses on early modern English drama and travel writing, premodern critical race studies, language and science fiction. Galarrita is the former director of the Race and the Premodern Period Speaker Series at University of California at Riverside.

Kim F. Hall is the Lucyle Hook Professor of English and a Professor of Africana Studies at Barnard College where she teaches courses in Early Modern/ Renaissance Literature, Black Feminist Studies, Critical Race Theory and Food Studies. She is the author of Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England, Othello: Texts and Contexts and The Sweet Taste of Empire: Sugar, Gender and Material Culture in Seventeenth Century England (under contract with UPenn Press). She was the 2018 Wanamaker Fellow at Shakespeare’s Globe and in 2016, Diverse Issues in Higher Education named her one of “25 Women Making a Difference in Higher Education and Beyond.” She is working on a book project, 'Othello Was My Grandfather': Shakespeare and Race in the African Diaspora, for which she has received grants from the NEH, the National Humanities Center and the Schomburg Center for Research in African-American Culture.

Dan-el Padilla Peralta is Associate Professor of Classics at Princeton University, where he is associated with the Department of African American Studies and affiliated with the Programs in Latino Studies and Latin American Studies and the University Center for Human Values. A Dominican by birth and New Yorker by upbringing, he holds degrees from Princeton, Oxford, and Stanford. He is the author of Undocumented: A Dominican Boy’s Odyssey from a Homeless Shelter to the Ivy League (Penguin 2015) and Divine Institutions: Religions and Community in the Middle Roman Republic (Princeton University Press 2020); and he has co-edited Rome, Empire of Plunder: The Dynamics of Cultural Appropriation (Cambridge University Press 2017). 
 

Cord J. Whitaker is Associate Professor of English at Wellesley and Senior Antiracism Consultant at Sagely. A scholar and teacher in late medieval literature, medievalism, and modern racial politics, Whitaker is the author of Black Metaphors: How Modern Racism Emerged from Medieval Race-Thinking (U. Penn. Press, 2019) and is currently writing on Harlem Renaissance literary medievalism and its political import. The recipient of numerous awards and fellowships, Whitaker’s scholarly activism has involved founding and contributing to a number of antiracist scholarly collectives, developing and publishing in scholarly political venues, and advising on antiracist organizational strategy within and outside of academe.