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?
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.
Speakers
Abdulhamit Arvas (University of Pennsylvania)
Denva Gallant (Rice University)
Nahir Otaño Gracia (University of New Mexico)
Joshua Mangle (Converse University)
Thai-Catherine Matthews (Skidmore College)
Melissa Sanchez (University of Pennsylvania)
Iman Sheeha (Brunel University)
Thelma Trujillo (University of Iowa)
Yunning Zhang (The New School)
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.