A Zoom panel titled “Whose Renaissance: Re-Imagining the Early Modern World in the Age of White Supremacy” will be held on Thursday, Oct. 29 at 5:30 p.m. CDT. Please visit https://go.unl.edu/whoserenaissanceunl to register and to receive the Zoom link.
The one-hour panel will touch on current global conversations about race and identity and examine them in terms of the history of art, design and material culture.
This panel unsettles white supremacist approaches to the Renaissance that credit western Europe with virtually all early modern innovations.
Spanning from the Vikings to the Spanish Caribbean, from the 9th century to Twitter wars of the present day, the talks situate the Renaissance, and the idea of early modernity in general, at the center of contemporary conversations about history and cultural patrimony. The focus is on innovative and speculative approaches that resist entrenched narratives of mastery.
The two panelists include University of Texas at Austin Associate Professor of Art History Stephanie Mulder and Bucknell University Assistant Professor of Spanish and Africana Studies Nick Jones.
School of Art, Art History & Design Professor of Art History Katie Anania will moderate the panel.
“The talks will be very accessible to the general public, with plenty of appeal for both scholars and non-scholars alike,” Anania said. “I love both of these speakers’ work and think their ideas bring alive a lot of questions about history gets formulated and why we continue to explore it.”
Mulder’s talk is titled “From Renaissance to Renaissances: Toward a New Paradigm in Art History.” She is a a specialist in Islamic art, architectural history, archaeology and cultural heritage and has conducted archaeological and art historical fieldwork throughout the Middle East. Mulder’s book, The Shrines of the ‘Alids in Medieval Syria: Sunnis, Shi’s and the Architecture of Coexistence, received numerous awards, and she is frequently interviewed and writes for popular media.
Jones’ talk is titled “Centering Blackness as an Anti-Racist Method.” His research agenda explores the agency, subjectivity and performance of black diasporic identities in early modern Iberia and the Ibero-Atlantic world. He is the author of Staging Habla de Negros: Radical Performances of the African Diaspora in Early Modern Spain (Penn State University Press) and co-editor of “Early Modern Black Diaspora Studies: A Critical Anthology (Palgrave). Jones also is co-editor of the Routledge Critical Junctures in Global Early Modernities book series with Derrick Higginbotham and has published widely in peer-reviewed venues such as Colonial Latin American, Hispanic Review, Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies, postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies, and University of Toronto Quarterly.
“Whose Renaissance?” is co-sponsored by the School of Art, Art History & Design and the University of Nebraska–Lincoln’s Research Council.