This online conference is supported by the International Centre on Racism and Monitor Racism Magazine.
Call for Papers, deadline – 20 April 2022
Scholarship on the early modern ‘witch hunts’ is extensive, and has demonstrated their transformational consequences for women and patriarchal societies in the West. In addition, intersectional research on race and gender has blossomed in recent years across a range of disciplines, and has shown beyond doubt the relationship between racism and sexism around the globe. Yet the specific story of the witch-hunts and their connection with race remains untold, in terms of origins, consequences, and echoes.
This conference aims to fill this lacuna on a global scale, and is inspired by the work of this year’s PKC Millins laureate, Dr Anya Topolski (Radboud, The Netherlands), who will deliver at the event her lecture, ‘Dehumanisation: Race, Religion and the European Witch Hunts.’
In addition, we are excited to host keynote lectures by Dr Rebecca Futo Kennedy, Dennison University, USA, on ‘Fear of Foreign Women in the Athenian Tragedies and Law’, and Julie Pascoet, European Network Against Racism, on Islamophobia and women in Europe.
To facilitate global participation, the event will run from 14.00-18.00 GMT over three days.
We invite paper proposals that speak to one or more of the following themes:
- Race and the persecution of women in antiquity.
- A global framework for thinking about the pre-history and consequences of the witch-hunts.
- The political theology of the racialised persecution of women.
- European colonial states, including settler-colonialisms.
- Post-modernity.Anti-Black racism, Islamophobia, Romaphobia, antisemitism.
- The Reformation and Counter-Reformation.Conspiratorial thought.Women, race, and the diabolical.
- The contemporary global far-right.
Please send a 250 word abstract and 100 word bio by 20 April 2022 to: icr@edgehill.ac.uk.
For any questions, please contact Professor James Renton: james.renton@edgehill.ac.uk