English Professor publishes book, Race in Early Modern England
MORGANTOWN, W.Va. Sept. 26, 2007: Dr. Jonathan Burton, Woodburn Associate Professor of English Literature in the Eberly College of Arts and Sciences at West Virginia University, has co-authored an essential anthology for early modern scholarship entitled Race in Early Modern England.
The book compiles primary materials from sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England highlighting the range and complexity of racial vocabularies and practices. The collected documents range from travelers’ narratives and medical texts to biblical exegesis, recipe books, and scientific tracts. In addition, the introduction discusses writings on religion, skin color, sexual and marital practices, geography and the human body to explain pre-Enlightenment lineages of racial categories.
The Age of Enlightenment evolved in Western Europe in the eighteenth century and used reason to challenge medieval notions of theology, politics and philosophy, and is often associated with the rise of scientific thinking. The book challenges the idea that, prior to the Age of Enlightenment, notions of cultural difference were less scientific and, therefore, not as harmful as later notions. As Dr. Burton explains, “the discourse of scientific racism is not only cultural itself but also continuous with many early modern notions that were expressed in different vocabularies.”
Dr. Burton, who earned his Ph.D. from The City University of New York in 2000, recently published Traffic and Turning: Islam and English Drama, 1579-1624. He teaches Shakespeare and Renaissance studies courses at the undergraduate and graduate levels at WVU. His co-author, Dr. Ania Loomba, is the Catherine Bryson Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania.
Dr. Burton believes that the “book’s longer, more complex history of race is crucial to the projects of activists, scholars and students working to denaturalize and overcome racism around the world.”
To order a copy of Race in Early Modern England, visit http://palgrave-usa.com/catalog/product.aspx?isbn=1403961670. For more information, please contact Dr. Jonathan Burton at Jonathan.Burton@mail.wvu.edu.
W-V-U