Dorothy Kim

2025-26 Long-term Fellow

Chaucer’s Black London

In November 2023, the UK minister Kemi Badenoch lodged a formal complaint against the Museum of London about an article I collaboratively published with several bioanthropologists and a bioarchaeologist. Her complaint called the work documenting the presence of fourteenth-century, London Black communities “woke archaeology.” We observed within our fields a systematic methodological whitewashing of the entire Western European medieval population record. No grave sites, other than our study’s two London sites, have been analyzed to determine the race of those buried. Scholars had assumed everyone was white. Similarly, in medieval legal records, there has been almost no discussion of several court documents that describe the everyday Black lives in medieval England.

I propose to build on Black Atlantic studies, like Saidiya Hartman’s “Venus in Two Acts,” and premodern critical race work to recover the histories of enslaved people who are often invisible in the archive. This book applies this methodology with records in London from 1350-1602 through the lens of Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. I choose Chaucer because he is a medieval London author whose literary place as the father of English poetry is consolidated through sixteenth-century, London print publication. This book brings an interdisciplinary method focused on race, gender, sexuality, and class that pulls from newly reassessed archives to imagine a premodern Black London.