Hicks-Bartlett, Alani. “Redefining the 'foreign' in medieval and early modern texts.” Throughlines. www.throughlines.org/suite-content/Redefining-the-foreign-in-medieval-and-early-modern-texts. [date accessed].

Redefining the “foreign” in medieval and early modern texts

Breaking temporal and linguistic boundaries

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Alani Hicks-Bartlett
Brown University

Students often perceive premodern texts, especially those with origins beyond the English language, as inscrutable or “foreign.” To help bridge students’ relationship between their present and the cultures and histories of the premodern, Hicks-Bartlett assigns texts across temporal and linguistic ranges. Putting premodern texts in conversation with contemporary critical theory and scholarship guides students to deeper understandings of the reverberations of race, gender, and class across time.

Further learning

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Syllabus

Race in the premodern world

In this class, Mayte Green-Mercado guides students through premodern origins of the construction of race and the consequences it carries today.

Mayte Green-Mercado
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[Re]constructing disciplines

What do we mean when we talk about classics or the classical? Dan-el Padilla Peralta deconstructs the history of the field of classics and its investment in hegemony, and how it carries with it an assignment of value.

Dan-el Padilla Peralta
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Where were the Black people in the Middle Ages?

Records and texts from the period offer insight into a rich and cosmopolitan medieval Europe, where there were not only Black people, but they held positions of power and prestige.

Cord J. Whitaker

Selected annotated bibliography