Race in the Archives (Talk by Sierra Lomuto)

The Global Middle Ages at the Morgan Library

Abstract

Before race became an institutionally codified formation, it was made within the contours of literary discourse. This talk will examine the 14th century travel romance The Book of John Mandeville through a critical framework of race, demonstrating how it constructed bodies of color for Latin European consumption. I will discuss how racial formations operate across the medieval-modern divide, while connecting my analysis of a “global medieval” methodology to the Morgan Library and the librarian who founded its original archive: Belle da Costa Greene. One of the most important librarians in modern American history and a luminary in the rare book world of the first half of the 20th century, Greene was also a Black woman who passed as white for nearly her entire life. She became the first Black fellow of the Medieval Academy of America in 1939, but it wasn’t until 60 years later (when Jean Strouse published JP Morgan’s biography in 1999) that her Black heritage became public knowledge. As Greene becomes a symbol for diversity and inclusion in the field today, what does her passing racial identity invite us to see about the complexities of race in our medieval archives?

Bio

Sierra Lomuto is an Assistant Professor in the English Department at Rowan University. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania in 2018 and is a former community college student from San Francisco. She is also an assistant editor for Boundary 2: an international journal of literature and culture. Her research explores racial formations in medieval literature, focusing in particular on the global relations between Latin Europe and the Mongol Empire. Her articles are published in the scholarly journals Exemplaria and postmedieval, and the edited collection Rethinking Medieval Margins and Marginality (Routledge). She has also written public essays for various online venues. Her 2016 essay “White Nationalism and the Ethics of Medieval Studies” was posted at In the Middle, and her work on this topic has been quoted in The New Yorker, The Economist, the Chronicle for Higher Education, and most recently Teen Vogue. She has forthcoming work in The Chaucer Encyclopedia and a Cambridge volume on medieval travel writing, and she is co-authoring an essay for MLA Approaches to teaching Arthurian Literature with Shokoofeh Rajabzadeh.