RaceB4Race Mentorship Network

Rosa Andújar is a Senior Lecturer (i.e. Associate Professor) at King’s College London. A classicist with broad interests in Greek antiquity and its complex afterlife, she has published widely on both ancient Greek literature and its modern reception. Recent publications include The Greek Trilogy of Luis Alfaro (Methuen Drama 2020), which was awarded the 2020 London Hellenic Prize, Greeks and Romans on the Latin American Stage (Bloomsbury 2020), and Paths of Song: The Lyric Dimension of Greek Tragedy (De Gruyter 2018). She is currently completing a monograph on the Greek tragic chorus, and is co-editing the forthcoming Cambridge Companion to Classics and Race (Cambridge University Press). She is Associate Editor for Greek Literature for the American Journal of Philology.  

Roland Betancourt (he or they) is Professor of Art History at the University of California, Irvine, and is an expert on the Byzantine Empire, including its art, liturgy, and theology, with an interest in issues of sexuality, gender identity, and race. Betancourt is the author of three monographs, Byzantine Intersectionality: Sexuality, Gender, and Race in the Middle Ages (Princeton University Press, 2020), Performing the Gospels in Byzantium: Sight, Sound, and Space in the Divine Liturgy (Cambridge University Press, 2021), and Sight, Touch, and Imagination in Byzantium (Cambridge University Press, 2018), as well as several edited volumes. Betancourt is a queer, first-generation Cuban American.

Dennis Britton researches and teaches early modern English literature, with a focus on the history of race, critical race theory, Protestant theology, and the history of emotion. He is the author of Becoming Christian: Race, Reformation, and Early Modern English Romance (2014), and has recently co-edited a special issue of the journal Spenser Studies on “Spenser and Race.” He is currently working on two books, Shakespeare and Pity: Feeling Difference on the Early Modern English Stage and Reforming Ethiopia: African-Anglo Relations in Protestant England.

Urvashi Chakravarty is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Toronto and works on early modern English literature, critical race studies, queer studies, and the history of slavery. Her first book, Fictions of Consent: Slavery, Servitude, and Free Service in Early Modern England (Penn Press, 2022), explores the ideologies of Atlantic slavery in early modern England; her second book, currently in progress, is titled From Fairest Creatures: Race, Reproduction, and Slavery in the Early Modern British Atlantic World. Her articles appear or are forthcoming in English Literary Renaissance, Shakespeare Quarterly, Renaissance Quarterly, the Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies, and others.

Vanessa I. Corredera is an Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of English at Andrews University. Her early scholarship looked at the physiognomic embodiment of identity on the early modern stage, and her most recent work considers the intersections between Shakespeare, race, and representation in popular culture, adaptations / appropriations, and performance. Her monograph, Reanimating Othello in Post-racial America (November 2022, Edinburgh UP), examines the ideological frames used to craft anti-black and anti-racist Othellos during an era in which people were encouraged not to “see” race.

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 is the incoming Vice President of the Shakespeare Association of America (2023-24), 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.

Mayte Green-Mercado is an Associate Professor of History at Rutgers University—Newark, and the director of the Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies minor. She has published articles on early modern apocalypticism, the conversion of Iberian Muslims, and race and ethnicity in early modern Spain. Her first book, Visions of Deliverance: Moriscos and the Politics of Prophecy in the Early Modern Mediterranean (Cornell, 2019), won the Wadjih F. al-Hamwi Prize for the Best First Book in Mediterranean Studies from The Mediterranean Seminar. She is founder and co-director of the Mediterranean Displacements Project at Rutgers-Newark.
 

Kim F. Hall's research and teaching cover Renaissance/Early Modern Literature and Culture, Critical Race Theory, Black Feminist Studies, Slavery Studies, Visual Culture, Food Studies, and Digital Humanities. She was born Baltimore and holds a doctorate in sixteenth and seventeenth century English Literature from the University of Pennsylvania. Her first book, Things of Darkness, published in 1996 by Cornell University Press, used a black feminist approach to interpret Renaissance literature and helped generate a new wave of scholarship on race in Shakespeare and Renaissance/Early Modern texts. Her second book, Othello: Texts and Contexts (Bedford/St. Martin’s Press, 2006) offers readers visual and verbal textual materials that illuminate themes in Shakespeare’s play. She is currently working on two book projects: Sweet Taste of Empire, which examines the roles of race, aesthetics and gender in the Anglo-Caribbean sugar trade during the seventeenth century and a new project, Othello was My Grandfather: Shakespeare and the African Diaspora, which discusses Afrodiasporic appropriations of Othello..   

Carissa Harris is Associate Professor of English at Temple University. Her research and teaching focus on gender and sexuality in late medieval England and Scotland. She is the author of Obscene Pedagogies: Transgressive Talk and Sexual Education in Late Medieval Britain (Cornell, 2018) and co-editor, with Sarah Baechle and Elizaveta Strakhov, of Rape Culture and Female Resistance in Late Medieval Literature (Penn State, 2022). She currently serves as an editor for the journal Exemplaria: Medieval, Early Modern, Theory and for ACMRS’s digital publication The Sundial.   

Wan-Chuan Kao (he/him) is an associate professor of English at Washington and Lee University. His research interests include medieval literature (especially Chaucer), whiteness studies, critical race studies, gender and sexuality, queer studies, travel writing, hotel theory, affect, and aesthetics. Kao’s first monograph, White Before Whiteness in the Late Middle Ages (Manchester University Press, 2024), examines late medieval representations of whiteness across bodily and non-somatic figurations. He is currently at work on his second book project, tentatively titled Holding the Premodern, which rethinks the figure of the hold in premodernity alongside the historiography of racial capitalism and logistics.  

Christina H. Lee is Associate Professor of Spanish and Portuguese at Princeton University. She was born in South Korea and raised in Argentina. She is the author of five book, most recently, Saints of Resistance: Devotions in the Philippines of Early Spanish Rule (Oxford University Press, 2021). She is also the co-editor with Julia Schleck of the global history book series Connected Histories in Early Modern Europe (Amsterdam University Press). She received an NEH grant in 2022 to carry out the project “A Digital Repatriation of a Lost archive of the Spanish Pacific: The Library of The Convent of San Pablo (Manila, 1762)” with Cristina Juan (SOAS, University of London). This project will repatriate more than 1,500 books and manuscripts seized from the archives of the Convent of San Pablo (now the Church of San Agustin) during the British occupation of Manila, 1762 to 1764.

Afrodesia McCannon received her PhD from the University of California – Berkeley in Comparative Literature (French, English, German) and has been a Fulbright and NEH fellow. She teaches in Liberal Studies, a global humanities program, at New York University. She has a particular interest in the medieval autobiographical impulse, and the uses of the medieval past.  Dr. McCannon has published essays and responses in Folklore, postmedieval, ELN, Viator, and beyond. She is on the steering committee of the fellowship of Medievalists of Color and has chaired the Medieval Academy of America’s Mentoring Program Committee and the Inclusivity and Diversity Committee.   

Kavita Mudan Finn is an independent scholar who has published widely on medieval and early modern literature, Shakespeare, popular medievalism, and fan/reception studies. Her first book, The Last Plantagenet Consorts: Gender, Genre, and Historiography 1440-1627, was published in 2012 and her work has appeared in Viator, Shakespeare, Medieval & Renaissance Drama in England, Arthuriana, Critical Survey, The Journal of Fandom Studies, Quarterly Review of Film and Video, and a range of edited volumes. Most recently, she taught at MIT. When not managing a two-child, two-dog circus, she is working on a biography of the fifteenth-century queen Elizabeth Woodville.

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). 
 

Carla María Thomas is an assistant professor of English at Florida Atlantic University and earned their PhD from New York University in 2016. Carla works on both antiracist scholarship in medieval studies and Early Middle English religious verse. They have published on the Ormulum and Poema Morale, and are working on a Modern English translation of the Ormulum. Their most recent publication, “Embodying Antiracist White Latinidad in Medieval Studies,” in Literature Compass (2021) is part of a special volume based talks at the inaugural RaceB4Race in 2019. Carla is also a founding member of the Medievalists of Color and a founding Executive Board member of RaceB4Race.