How do racialized icons of popular culture index Muslim ideas of history and belonging? Several Arabic epics (siyar sha‘biyya) contain Black protagonists who are assigned unique origin stories and legacies of involvement in Islam’s expansion. This talk will analyze their roles in the racial imaginaries of popular tales that proliferated from the 12th century onward across the Middle East and North Africa through oral and written traditions. Rachel Schine earned her Ph.D. in Near Eastern ...

Please join us for a talk with Dr. Mayte Green-Mercado (Professor of History at Rutgers University--Newark) on the displacement of Moriscos —Iberian Muslims forcibly converted to Catholicism in the first two decades of the sixteenth century. In this discussion of an ethno-religious minority group, we will be exploring the possibilities of undisciplining and redisciplining histories of race and race-making in the premodern Mediterranean. Mayte Green-Mercado received her B.A. in European History from the University of ...