The Department of French and Italian is delighted to announce the 2025 Philip Watts Memorial Lecture: Dr. Noémie Ndiaye (University of Chicago) “Inventing Racial Whiteness: Early Modern Playbooks of Racial Triangulation”
Wednesday, April 2, 2025
1:30-3:00pm
William Pitt Union Ballroom
Refreshments after the lecture
The Watts Lecture honors the memory of Dr. Philip Watts (1961-2013), former chair and faculty member of the Department of French and Italian and specialist of 20th-century French literature and film.
Noémie Ndiaye is an Associate Professor of English Literature at the University of Chicago with a coterminous appointment in the department of Romance Languages and Literatures. She works on early modern English, French, and Spanish theater with a critical focus on race. Her first monograph Scripts of Blackness: Early Modern Performance Culture and the Making of Race (University of Pennsylvania Press 2022) shows how performance culture helped strategically turn blackness into a racial category across early modern Western Europe. Scripts of Blackness won the 2023 Bevington Award (Medieval and Renaissance Drama Society), the 2023 Rose Mary Crawshay Prize (The British Academy), the 2023 Shakespeare’s Globe Book Award (Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre), the 2022 George Freedley Memorial Award (Theatre Library Association), the 2023 Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Comparative Literary Studies (Modern Languages Association) and the 2024 First Book Award (Shakespeare Association of America). Ndiaye is the co-editor, with Lia Markey, of Seeing Race Before Race: Visual Culture and the Racial Matrix in the Premodern World (ACMRS Press 2023), which won the 2024 PROSE Award in the “Art Exhibitions” category from the Association of American Publishers. She has published articles in Shakespeare Quarterly, Renaissance Quarterly, Renaissance Drama, Early Theatre, English Literary Renaissance, Literature Compass, Thaêtre, and in various edited collections. (headshot attached)
Sponsored by the Department of French and Italian with generous support from the European Studies Center, Early Modern Worlds, Medieval & Renaissance Studies Program, Africana Studies, Religious Studies, Jewish Studies Program, English, Literature Program, Theatre Arts, History of Art and Architecture, and Spanish and Portuguese.
This event is part of the European Study Center’s Unmasking Prejudice: Confronting Antisemitism, Islamophobia, and Racism Across Europe Series.