Events

On Sunday, December 8, Baroque band ACRONYM will be performing at Shriver Hall. MEMS has secured a block of free student tickets and reserved one of the CAHSS buses to transport students from UMBC to the concert. This is a fantastic opportunity to see an exciting group! Tickets are limited and first come, first served. Email Dr. Lindsay Johnson at lmjohnson@umbc.edu to reserve a student ticket and indicate if you plan to take the bus.

The bus will leave campus at 4pm and return around 8pm. The concert begins at 5:30pm and includes a 4:30pm pre-concert interview with the performers.

Four members of the Baroque band ACRONYM will lead an open discussion and workshop with UMBC's Collegium Musicum. They will speak about their performance process, which begins with finding pieces in archives and ends in performance. As their website says, the group "is dedicated to giving modern primers of the wild instrumental music of the seventeenth century." Come listen and learn something new about 17th-century music!

On Friday, November 22 at 7:30 in The Music Box, the Department of Music presents the UMBC Collegium Musicum in a concert entitled Phat Phancies and other English Ditties. The ensemble will perform a variety of short works in small consort groupings using viola da gamba, recorder, and drum.

UMBC Collegium Musicum is a performance ensemble dedicated to exploring and performing vocal and instrumental music from Medieval, Renaissance, and Baroque periods, sampling musical repertories created between 800 and 1750. 

What’s Love Got to Do with It?: Medieval Romance as Critical Race Studies Archive

Premodern critical race scholarship regularly treats medieval romances as evidence for the development of race in premodernity. It is less common for scholars to discuss why studying the medieval romance genre on the whole is productive. This talk argues that medieval romance, with all its adventure, irony, and burgeoning interiority, was especially well equipped to register the concerns and “cultural fantasies”—political and personal, artistic and administrative—of people in Christian Europe in the eleventh through fifteenth centuries CE. This talk also explores the elements of medieval romance that supply its enduring power and have allowed it to shape a modernity in which love is taken for granted as integral to familial structures and as a desirable end in-and-of itself. While, since the Enlightenment, romantic love has often been used to maintain racial distinctions and hierarchies, this paper will consider the ways the romance tradition also enfolds cultural, religious, and racial diversity that challenges those very distinctions. I will present as evidence several medieval romances that challenge modern racial distinctions: the King of Tars, Aucassin et Nicolette, and Le Roman de la Rose, among others. This paper asks: What are the medieval romance archive’s implications for modern racism and antiracism? And, finally, what’s love got to do with them?

Dr. Cord J. Whitaker is an Associate Professor in the Department of English and Creative Writing at Wellesley, where he specializes in the literature of the Middle Ages and the histories of race and racism. The author of Black Metaphors: How Modern Racism Emerged from Medieval Race-Thinking and a host of articles on race and the Middle Ages as well as the editor of important volumes on the topic, Whitaker has led significant initiatives in diversity and inclusion within medieval studies and beyond.