Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies

Freak out! Register for the keynote event for Love: A RaceB4Race Symposium is legendary musician and songwriter Nile Rodgers. Nile is a Rock & Roll Hall of Fame inductee, Songwriters Hall of Fame inductee and a multiple Grammy Award winning artist. Save your spot: na.eventscloud.com/asu-nile-rod...

RaceB4Race First and Second Book Institutes deadline has been extended until Friday! Apply this week to join a cohort of PCRS scholars to work on your book projects.
acmrs.asu.edu/RaceB4Race/F...

Such good news for ASU!

Welcome to ASU @platanoclassics.bsky.social!
“Dan-el Padilla Peralta is in the vanguard of scholars working to ensure that the complexities of the past are not flattened in service to the monochrome myths of our day,” said Jeffrey Cohen, dean of humanities at ASU.
news.asu.edu/b/20251112-d...

Got a PCRS book project? Looking for community and guidance in the process? The RaceB4Race First and Second Book Institutes are here for you! Run by @folger.edu the institutes connect scholars with readers and experts.

First book: forms.gle/ht75W13xphDj...
Second book: forms.gle/gMSuCSjUj9dH...

Thank you to Andrea Myers Achi for your contributions to Throughlines!

Learn about the pedagogy of careful curation and how exhibitions can confront power structures, reshape public understandings of history, and highlight racial and cultural complexity.
www.throughlines.org/suite-conten...

Thank you to everyone who attended "Shakespeare now but not Hamlet again" last night with the brilliant Emma Smith! Thoughtful, compelling, funny, and revelatory. And thank you Emma Smith for the lecture and filming with Throughlines! More to come soon!

Hope to see you tomorrow for 'Shakespeare now — but not Hamlet again' an evening lecture with renowned scholar Emma Smith. Where she will offer an answer to the question, what is the Shakespeare play that best speaks to this historical moment?

na.eventscloud.com/emma-smith

A book salon for The Sweet Taste of Empire by @profkfh.bsky.social? Tonight? Yes please! Still time to get your tickets. See you there!
www.eventbrite.com/e/the-sweet-...

Applications are open for the RaceB4Race First and Second Book Institutes @acmrs.bsky.social. @mhanses.bsky.social and I took part in the 2024 Second Book Institute with our Cicero project, and we learned so much from early modernists. Cannot recommend enough! acmrs.asu.edu/RaceB4Race/F...

Trio of Indigenous plays to debut at upcoming book launch | ASU News On a crisp October evening, Indigenous stories will take center stage at Arizona State University’s Tempe campus.

Monday, Oct. 20, ASU English professors Larissa FastHorse, Michael John Garcés and Ty Defoe facilitate an evening of Indigenous stories: "Native Nation Project"—a book launch, reading and discussion of the collaborative work.

More: ow.ly/jBf050XcKRm #ASUHumanities @acmrs.bsky.social

Trio of Indigenous plays to debut at upcoming book launch | ASU News On a crisp October evening, Indigenous stories will take center stage at Arizona State University’s Tempe campus.

Join us on Monday October 20 for an incredible book launch event with Larissa FastHorse, Michael John Garcés and Ty Defoe. And check out this interview with them about their work and an upcoming Oronooko adaptation... (!) news.asu.edu/20251016-art...

Last week BTS with Cassie L. Smith for Throughlines. Her scholarship explores the long history of Black literature from Olaudah Equiano to Phillis Wheatley to Black-ish. Be on the lookout for more!

What is the Shakespeare play that speaks to our current moment? Oxford professor Emma Smith has ideas: definitely not Hamlet. Join us for her talk on November 6 to hear her thoughts on the play that reflects some of our concerns, and use its fictions for good.
na.eventscloud.com/ereg/index.p...

Love: A RaceB4Race Symposium is now open for registration!

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?

na.eventscloud.com/raceb4race-l...

Yale professor Tarren Andrews understands the importance of language. She teaches her students that law is a linguistic technology shaped by culture. Find more of her thoughts and pedagogy including videos and reading lists on Throughlines.
www.throughlines.org/scholars/tar...

Abdulhamit Arvas creates classrooms spaces where discomfort sparks growth, where students wrestle with hard questions, and where they learn to read beyond their own assumptions and beliefs. You can read his teaching materials on Throughlines now. www.throughlines.org/scholars/abd...

Latest Daedalus journal features ASU scholars, asks readers to think about our past and future | ASU News “How will we think about the past in the future?” asks the latest issue of Daedalus.

The latest issue of Daedalus, journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, was guest-edited by ASU English professor Ayanna Thompson & includes contributions from ASU President Michael Crow + other writers, artists & scholars.

Learn more: ow.ly/63XX50WRASB #ASUHumanities @acmrs.bsky.social

An Open Letter to Our Students: Universities Do Not Deserve You At the start of the school year, two professors provide some hard truths about the state of academia and what you should fight for.

"You should remember that students have led or been in solidarity with the most important struggles for a sustainable, equitable world in the 20th and 21st centuries. Students have connected their ability to study power’s intentions to these global struggles." www.thenation.com/article/soci...

A New ‘Pericles’ Pairs Shakespeare With Black Gospel

This tragicomedy about life, love and transformation has been reimagined as a two-hour-long musical inspired by the gospel traditions of the American Black church, and presented by the Public Works program of the Public Theater.

(Dramaturged by THE Ayanna Thompson)

www.nytimes.com/2025/08/29/t...

Screenshot of the Daedalus webpage, where it shows the title of Madeline Sayet's play, Let's Get Lost in the Cycle of Time Together.

⌛ Fiction Friday: "Behaving like human beings are the center of everything doesn’t make it true."

From "Let’s Get Lost in the Cycle of Time Together" by ASU English professor @madelinesayet.bsky.social‬.

Read the play in Daedalus: ow.ly/AplZ50WMhFy #ASUHumanities CC: @acmrs.bsky.social

‘Twelfth Night’ Review: Lupita Nyong’o in Illyria

"It’s a romp, a tonic, an escape from the clamorous world into a fantasy." Check out the review of Shakespeare in the Park's Twelfth Night, dramaturged by Ayanna Thompson 👀
www.nytimes.com/2025/08/21/t...

Have you got your copy yet? Can't wait for this launch event for The Sweet Taste of Empire by the incomparable @profkfh.bsky.social

This is fantastic news! One of the early postmedieval utopian texts that helped develop a French strand of utopian literature & that paved the way for the ambiguous & satirical approaches of Cyrano de Bergerac, Denis Veiras & Gabriel de Foigny. I'm really looking forward to reading it.

This was one of my favorite projects to be a part of in recent memory. Get your syllabus ready for the fall. Check out Throughlines today.

Throughlines — Race in the premodern classroom Created by field-leading scholars, Throughlines’ pedagogical approaches offer accessible and critical ways to incorporate discussions of race in the premodern studies classroom.

I really needed this today.

Ayanna Thompson sent me a link to this jaw-dropping thing they built with a Mellon grant at @acmrs.bsky.social

You can get lost in it.

A spectacular reminder that digital resources don't have to be about surveillance, coercion, & disciplining the labor force.

"...—whether, in his words, the study of ancient worlds can be used 'for world-building.'"

Dan-el Padilla Peralta on Learning How to Combat Loss The Princeton classicist shares works that informed his thinking on identity and world-building, and his book “Classicism and Other Phobias.”

“'Classicism and Other Phobias,' contends with loss in its own way, by asking if classics might be used to combat forces, like racism, that give rise to profound losses... ” @newyorker.com @platanoclassics.bsky.social www.newyorker.com/books/book-c...

Cover of the latest issue of Daedalus journal, themed How Will We Think about the Past in the Future?

🐴 Fiction Friday: "That’s the key: the patterns. Without them, it’s just people in horse costumes."

From "Horseplay" by ASU English alum @leahenewsom.bsky.social‬. Read the story in Daedalus, journal of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences: ow.ly/2LMN50WFv9k #ASUHumanities CC: @acmrs.bsky.social

Arden Shakespeare fourth series is coming! Read Titus 🥩 🥧 co-edited by Ayanna Thompson in May '26.