Love: A RaceB4Race Symposium
Arizona State University | January 23-24, 2026 | In person and livestreamed
This symposium explores the concept of love in the broadest sense. How does race inform the way we conceive of love? How does it influence our capacity to love? What does it mean to love in a time of turmoil, and what can the premodern world teach us about this? How do we negotiate loving a being, a nation, a profession that fails to love us back? In a time where hateful rhetoric floods our media and culture, how do we imagine, build, and sustain communities of love?
Speakers
- Abdulhamit Arvas University of Pennsylvania
- Denva Gallant Rice University
- Farah Karim-Cooper Folger Shakespeare Library
- Nahir I. Otaño Gracia University of New Mexico
- Thai-Catherine Matthews Skidmore College
- De’Aris Rhymes Arizona State University
- Melissa Sanchez University of Pennsylvania
- Thelma Trujillo University of Iowa
- Yunning Zhang The New School
Download the program
Keynote: An Evening with Nile Rodgers
January 24, 2026 | 6:00 pm | Carson Ballroom
Arizona State University presents a dialogue with legendary musician and songwriter, Nile Rodgers. Nile is a Rock & Roll Hall of Fame inductee, Songwriters Hall of Fame inductee and a multiple Grammy Award winning songwriter, composer, producer, arranger and guitarist.
Most recently he became the first creator to be awarded a Lifetime Achievement Grammy for his legacy in the same year as being awarded a Grammy for his work with Beyoncé on the smash hit “Cuff It”.
As the co-founder of CHIC, Nile pioneered a musical language that generated chart-topping hits like "Le Freak”, the biggest selling single in the history of Atlantic Records and sparked the advent of hip-hop with "Good Times” and “Rapper’s Delight”.
His work in The CHIC Organization, including “We Are Family” for Sister Sledge and “I’m Coming Out” for Diana Ross, and his productions for artists such as David Bowie (“Let’s Dance”), Madonna (“Like A Virgin”) and Duran Duran (“The Reflex”), have sold more than 600 million albums and 200 million singles worldwide, while his innovative, trendsetting collaborations with Daft Punk, Daddy Yankee, LE SSERAFIM, Coldplay and Beyoncé reflect the vanguard of contemporary hits.
About RaceB4Race
RaceB4Race is a cross-institutional scholarly community for scholars and students of premodern critical race studies. Bridging many traditional disciplinary divides, RaceB4Race not only creates innovative scholarly dialogues, but also fosters professional development and structural change within the many fields of premodern studies. As a model for what a horizontally organized learned society can do for its community, RaceB4Race looks to Arizona State University's charter, measuring ourselves not by whom we exclude, but by whom we include and how they succeed.RaceB4Race is brought to life by the Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies in partnership with The College of Liberal Arts and Sciences Division of Humanities and the Hitz Foundation.
Livestream information
This event will be livestreamed by ASU Live. The recording will be available to watch on the ACMRS YouTube channel afterwards.
Getting to Tempe
For information regarding lodging near the ASU Tempe Campus, please visit the Travel Information for ASU visitors page.
This event will take place in Carson Ballroom in Old Main. The closest parking garage to the venue is the Fulton Center parking structure. Learn more about parking rates here.