Race B4 Race 2026, Seminar 1: What We’re Reading and Why

See previous installments in this series here.

The RaceB4Race Mentorship Network began its work in 2022, intended to ‘offer new scholars support as they develop the research that will drive the academic conversation forward’. This Mellon-funded initiative spearheaded by the Director of the Folger Institute Dr. Patricia Akhimie not only includes individual mentorship opportunities, but also ‘a semester-long virtual reading/research group, meeting monthly to connect participants with a larger network of premodern critical race scholars’.

What are we reading?

For our first seminar meeting of the 2026-2027 academic year, we read Feminist Medievalisms: Embodiment and Vulnerability in Literature and Film (ARC Humanities, 2024) by Usha Vishnuvajjala.

USHA VISHNUVAJJALA is assistant professor of English at SUNY New Paltz, where she teaches medieval literature and gender studies. Prior to that, she held positions at Tulane University in New Orleans, American University in Washington DC, and Cardiff University in Wales. In addition to Feminist Medievalisms, she has co-edited the highly praised collection Women’s Friendship in Medieval Literature with Karma Lochrie, published in 2022 by Ohio State University Press, and a wide range of articles and book chapters on medieval romance, women’s writing, and modern popular medievalism.

Why are we reading this?

This book takes a very different approach to the study of popular medievalism, one that is ‘motivated by the desire to understand, to connect, to feel, or to help; they are focused on individual experience that may help us in understanding, exposing, and potentially resisting or changing how larger structures work, rather than focusing on those larger (social, political, national) structures’ (7).

To that end, the case studies in its first three chapters—on Jane Austen, Virginia Woolf, Madonna, and the 1992 film Sister Act, respectively—hardly appear to be medieval at all on first glance, but Vishnuvajjala teases out threads of medievalism in each, all connected to and by emotion. Jane Austen’s relationship to the medieval past, for instance, was largely mediated not through text but through visual art and archaeological ruins. When Catherine Morland visits the titular location in Northanger Abbey, her emotional engagement with the ruins she finds there—which are not themselves medieval, but remind her of Gothic novels—leads her to mistakenly believe that her host General Tilney murdered his wife. While this turns out to be false, Catherine’s negative impression of General Tilney is borne out when he turns her away after discovering she is not wealthy. Thus, even if Catherine’s facts were wrong, her intuition was correct that she shouldn’t trust General Tilney, and she partially arrived at that conclusion through her awareness of Gothic medievalist tropes. Similarly, she reads Madonna’s 1984 video for ‘Like a Prayer’ as a dream-vision filled with Christological imagery, juxtaposed with Sister Act, a film that (perhaps unintentionally) echoes a range of medieval romance narratives where women retreat to convents for safety and offers an illustration of how female religious communities can work as support networks.

As she makes clear in the introduction, this is a study heavily informed by a wide range of scholarly and disciplinary approaches. ‘Such a willingness to be vulnerable, to cease to pretend there is a barrier between our lived experience and our scholarship, is informed by feminist, queer, antiracist, and disability studies approaches to the humanities, and is of course not unique to medieval studies or medievalism. But it can and has enabled many of us to talk about medieval texts and affective medievalisms in new ways’ (11). Especially now, when so many of us are being actively discouraged from interrogating accepted histories, being open and honest about our engagements with the past is vitally important, and this book makes its intervention to point out that all those engagements, even the ones that seem tenuous or strange, are worth exploring.

She discusses all of these things in more detail in a fantastic interview she did with Danièle Cybulskie on The Medieval Podcast in 2024. I highly recommend you check it out!

Further reading

While I will not be going into the particulars of the discussion, in order to preserve the seminar space as a safe and private one, below is a list of scholarship that came up at different points during the discussion.

Carissa Harris, Obscene Pedagogies: Transgressive Talk and Sexual Education in Late Medieval Britain (Cornell, 2018).

Amy S. Kaufman and Paul Sturtevant, The Devil’s Historians: How Modern Extremists Abuse the Medieval Past (Toronto, 2020).

‘A Talk of Ten Wives on Their Husbands’ Ware’

“Feminist Medievalisms” on The Medieval Podcast, with Danièle Cybulskie. YouTube Link.

Medievalism and Reception, ed. Ellie Crookes and Ika Willis (D.S. Brewer, 2024).