Race, Romance, and the Complexion of Early Modern Print Culture

FAIN: FB-52563-06

Elizabeth A. Spiller
Regents of the University of California, Davis (Fort Worth, TX 76129-0001)

I am applying for an NEH Fellowship to complete a book entitled "Reading in Color: Race, Romance, and the Complexion of Early Modern Print Culture." This is a book about how the definition of race changed in the early modern period and how that historic development changed the act of reading and the identities of readers. Studying once widely read European romances of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, this project brings exciting recent scholarship in the history of the book together with ethnic studies to document the models of visual identity that inform modern understandings of race.