Talk Abstract
As England’s first colonial subjects, the medieval Welsh (whose exonym derives from the Old English term wealh, for foreigner or slave) are fundamental to our modern understanding of the historical arc of racial discourse in the Anglo-European world. To illuminate the complex history of how the Welsh became “white”, this talk highlights key moments across the multilingual literary history of premodern Britain, including Old English riddles, Anglo-Latin historiography, Middle Welsh lyric, and Shakespeare’s Henry V.
Presenter Bio
Dr. Coral Lumbley
Dr. Coral Lumbley is a Postdoctoral Faculty Fellow in Liberal Studies at New York University, where she teaches literary and visual arts of the premodern globe. She holds a PhD in English and Medieval Studies from the University of Illinois, and she is joining the English Department at Macalester College as an assistant professor this fall. Coral’s intersectional research on medieval Welsh, English, and Latin literatures blends premodern critical race, postcolonial, ecocritical, and trans studies. Her work has been published in venues including postmedieval, Medieval Feminist Forum, the Journal of World Literature. She also has an article on canine marginalia in Middle Welsh manuscripts forthcoming in the Journal of English and Germanic Philology.