Participant Bios
Lamia Balafrej
Lamia Balafrej is an Associate Professor of Art History at UCLA, specializing in the Islamic world. Forthcoming projects include a monograph on technical marvels and the politics of difference in medieval Islam and an edited volume with Hannah Barker (ASU) on race and ethnicity in medieval Africa, Europe, and the Middle East. Early findings have appeared as articles on gender, slavery, and technology (2023), automated slaves (2022), and images of domestic slavery (2021). This research has been supported by a 2023 Rome Prize, a 2023 Getty Scholar Grant, and a 2026 Berenson Fellowship at Harvard/I Tatti. Her first book, The Making of the Artist in Late Timurid Painting (2019), examined Persian painting’s intricacy, prompting her interest in instrumentality. Hailing from Morocco, she is an alumna of the École Normale Supérieure in Paris and received her PhD from the Université Aix-Marseille.
Hannah Barker
Hannah Barker is an Associate Professor of medieval history at Arizona State University. She studies connections between the Black Sea and the Mediterranean during the thirteenth through fifteenth centuries, especially the slave trade, which flourished during this period and the transmission of plague leading to the Black Death. Her book, That Most Precious Merchandise: The Mediterranean Trade in Black Sea Slaves, 1260-1500 (2019), received the Paul E. Lovejoy Prize awarded by the Journal of Global Slavery. Her current projects include a legal history of slavery, freedom, and status change in medieval Genoa; racialization through comparison in Ayyubid and Mamluk texts; and a volume co-edited with Lamia Balafrej on Ethnicity and Race in Medieval Europe, Africa, and the Middle East.
Mariah Bender
Mariah A-K Bender is a PhD candidate in the Department of History. Their project “Seizing Sovereignty: Palenquero Suzerainty in Panamá and Nueva Granada (1520-1694),” focuses on free Black communities in Nueva Granada and Tierra Firme (modern-day Panama and Colombia) during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Their inquiry explores how the social, religious, and political landscapes of communities in the Spanish Americas were shaped by centuries of diverse legal cultures from the Greater Senegambian region and Iberia. Their research methodologies utilize material culture, ritual theory from African religions, and Black geographies to explore how Africans challenged sovereignty and contributed to the legal pluralism of the early modern world. Mariah is also a digital humanist whose project, Mapping Resistance, is a set of digitized archival material about Africans in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in colonial Panama and Colombia, access to historical maps, transcription and translation services, and paleography tools.
Daphne Di Cinto
Daphne Di Cinto is a Black Italian screenwriter, director, and actor. An alumna of The Actors Studio Drama School in New York, she was in the cast of Netflix’s Bridgerton. Il Moro-The Moor, her directorial debut, was longlisted for the Oscars 2024. Daphne has won the Cultured Focus Visionary in Film Award 2022 and the Leader of Change in Creativity Award at the 2023 Black Carpet Awards. Her main focus is on stories about identity, historical memory, migrations, and the female gaze.
Olivia Dill
Olivia Dill is the Assistant Curator for Prints, Drawings, and Photographs at the Baltimore Museum of Art. She is a scholar of early modern Northern European prints and drawings with particular expertise in the work of the German-born artist-naturalist, Maria Sibylla Merian, and the production of natural history prints and drawings in the seventeenth-century colonial Dutch Atlantic. Dr. Dill is trained as a technical art historian and has studied the non-contact scientific identification of painters’ materials, especially the pigments used by early modern artists to depict insect iridescence. Olivia completed her PhD at Northwestern University and has held curatorial or research fellowships at the Morgan Library & Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Art Institute of Chicago.
Lily Filson
Lily Filson, Ph.D., is an art historian specializing in the global early modern world, with a focus on Yemen, the Red Sea, and Islamic–European exchange. Her research examines intersections of race, gender, and power across visual and literary traditions. She has received support from the American Institute for Yemeni Studies, the European Research Council, the Renaissance Society of America, and was a participant in the 2025 RaceB4Race Second Book Institute. Her work has appeared in journals including Journal of Arabian Studies and International Journal of Islamic Architecture. She is the author of Renaissance Automata of the Villa Pratolino: Magic, Mechanics, and Medici Ambition, and is currently developing a second book on the Itinerary of Ludovico de’ Varthema and its implications for early modern constructions of race and cross-cultural encounter.
Jeffrey Fleisher
Jeffrey Fleisher is a Professor of Anthropology at Rice University. He is an archaeologist that works in eastern and southern Africa, whose research has focused on questions that concern people often left out of archaeological interpretations: rural communities in urban settlement systems, non-elite people in cities, and communities beyond the frontiers of large-scale societies. This research has explored: the roles that rural and non-elite people play in the composition of urban societies and the way they participate in social, economic, and religious spheres; the transformation of village settlements to ‘rural’ ones as urban centers develop; the use material culture and space in the establishment and maintenance of social inequality and power; and the way people use everyday items such as ceramics, coins, and architecture in public performances and the construction of value.
Denva Gallant
Denva Gallant is an internationally recognized scholar of medieval and early Renaissance art whose work asks how images teach people to imagine themselves, others, and the worlds they inhabit. Across manuscript illumination, painting, sculpture, and architecture, she examines how visual forms cultivate devotional identities, organize racial meaning, and shape cultural memory. Her scholarship reveals medieval art as a vital archive for understanding the long histories of belief, representation, and human difference.
Dontay M. Givens II
Dontay M. Givens II (they/he) is a third-year PhD candidate in New York University’s English department. Their work is largely concerned with representations of blackness and black people in the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance with an emphasis on literature, philosophy, and visual culture from the Low Countries and Germany. Their dissertation, Dis-Imagining Form: Blackness, Aesthetics, and Mystical Sight in Northern Europe, 1300-1600 traces the devotional interfaces between late medieval mysticism, humanism, natural philosophy, and aesthetics. Dis-Imagining Form contends that an expanded literary and theoretical corpus—ranging from devotional texts, experimental rhetorical treatises, and painter’s manuals—alters our affective encounters with the figure of the black as a sign of transcendental Christian aesthetic or the Other. They have published work in Speculum with forthcoming work in Bloomsbury’s Ethnicity and Race in Western Literatures, and in RES: Journal of Anthropology and Aesthetics, written in collaboration with Amy Knight Powell.
Alani Hicks-Bartlett
Alani Hicks-Bartlett is Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature, French and Francophone Studies, and Hispanic Studies at Brown University, with affiliations in Italian Studies, the Center for the Study of the Early Modern World, the Program in Medieval Studies, and the Institute at Brown for Environment and Society. Her research prioritizes Medieval and Early Modern French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, and English literature, alongside classical intertexts. She has a special interest in critical theory, disability studies, critical race theory, Petrarchism, and gender and sexuality across genres, especially drama (tragedy), and lyric and epic poetry. Her recent publications have examined disability, race, and gender in early modern drama (including Shakespeare, Vélez de Guevara, and Calderón) and theatricality and authorship in Marie de France, Petrarch, Christine de Pizan, Cervantes, and Montaigne. She co-convenes Brown’s Disability Studies Working Group, co-chairs Harvard’s Renaissance Studies Seminar, and serves as editor-in-chief of postmedieval.
Paul Michael Johnson
Paul Michael Johnson is Associate Research Professor in the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures at Johns Hopkins University. A specialist in early modern Spanish literature, his writing has encompassed such topics as the history of emotion, the senses, and the body; race and gender; and translation and popular culture. He is the author of Affective Geographies: Cervantes, Emotion, and the Literary Mediterranean (Toronto, 2021), and co-editor of Cervantine Futures: Reading Cervantes after the Critical Turn (Vanderbilt, 2026) and Cervantes in Transit: Essays in Honor of Francisco Layna Ranz (Delaware, 2026). His work has also appeared in such journals as Renaissance Quarterly, PMLA, Atlantic Studies, MLN, and Exemplaria. Johnson’s current book project explores how the Renaissance construed red cheeks as a marker of racial difference.
Bryan C. Keene
Bryan C. Keene is professor of art history, museums studies, and theatre at Riverside City College, where they are also co-instructor with colleagues in Iraq and Jordan for bi-national collaborations and a member of the Indigenous Languages of Mexico cohort of the Council for American Overseas Research Centers. They are an award-winning curator and educator who developed fifteen exhibitions at the Getty Museum from 2010-2020 and they have published widely, including eight books as author or editor and over fifty articles. Their publications include the 26-author volume Toward a Global Middle Ages: Encountering the World through Illuminated Manuscripts (2019), the textbook Connecting the Medieval World, 500-1500: Comparisons, Contrasts, and New Approaches (2021 with Kimberly Klimek, Pamela Troyer, and Sarah Davis-Secord), The Fantasy of the Middle Ages: An Epic Journey through Imaginary Medieval Worlds (2022 with Larisa Grollemond), and Balthazar: A Black African King in Medieval and Renaissance Art (2023 with eleven contributors). Their current project foregrounds queer and trans contemporary artists who have drawn inspiration from medieval and Renaissance art, and they are also engaged in a multi-year quantitative and qualitative study about museum workplace experiences inspired by the QE team here at UMW.
Jacqueline Lombard
Jacqueline Lombard (Ph.D., University of Pittsburgh) is a Lecturer of Art History at the University of New Hampshire. Her research examines how visual representations shaped and reflected the politics of race, gender, and cross-cultural exchange between the medieval Mediterranean and northern Europe. Prior to joining UNH she was a Jane and Morgan Whitney Fellow in the Department of Medieval Art and the Cloisters at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and she has served as the editor in chief of the open access journal Contemporaneity: Historical Presence in Visual Culture. Her research has been further supported by the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), the University of Pittsburgh, and Middlebury College.
Alexandra Montero Peters
Alexandra Montero Peters is an assistant professor of History at Northwestern University. She is a historian of the medieval Mediterranean world, specifically the intellectual and cultural exchange between Iberia, North Africa, and the Near East. Her publications treat the real and imagined interactions between the Mongol world and Castile and analyze formulations of Blackness in Castilian manuscript illuminations. These themes and more inform her current book project, Representations of Power: Alfonso X, the Book of Games, and the Islamic Tradition, as well as other projects on race, court culture, and iconographies of intellectual prestige.
Mathilde Montpetit
Mathilde Montpetit is a PhD candidate in African History at New York University. Her dissertation examines how the use of eunuchs changed statecraft across the medieval Islamic World.
Olivette Otele
Professor Olivette Otele is a Distinguished Research Professor of the Legacies and Memory of Slavery at SOAS, University of London. She holds a Ph.D. from La Sorbonne, France. She is a Fellow and a former Vice President of the Royal Historical Society. She was a judge of the International Booker Prize. She is the recipient of 2 Honorary Doctorates: Concordia in Canada and UC Louvain in Belgium. Otele also contributes to the press and is a consultant for films in the US. Her 3rd book, African Europeans (2020) was ‘A Guardian Best book of 2020’ and was shortlisted for the LA Times Book Prize 2022. She also advises policymakers, banks, and charities on restorative justice (Welsh Government Audit on Slavery and Colonialism, the newspaper the Guardian ‘s Cotton Capital).
Craig Perry
Craig Perry is an associate professor at Emory University in the Department of Middle Eastern and South Asian Studies, the Tam Institute for Jewish Studies, and the Islamic Civilizations Studies Graduate Program. He is the author of Slavery and the Jews of Medieval Egypt (2026) and co-editor of The Cambridge World History of Slavery: Volume 2, 500 AD–1420 AD (2021).
Janet Marion Purdy
Janet Marion Purdy is associate curator, textiles, at the Art Institute of Chicago, visiting lecturer in art history at University of Chicago, and research/curatorial consultant for Qatar Museums, including the Qatar Pavilion at Venice Biennale Architettura 2025. Her multi-sited global research examines Afro-Arab-Asian visual relationships in textiles, metalwork, and architecture through artistic and cultural exchange across Africa, Southwest/Central Asia, and the Indian Ocean world.
She received her PhD in historical arts and architecture of Africa from Pennsylvania State University, and was a Fulbright Scholar in Zanzibar, Tanzania (2018–19).
Exhibitions include Embroidered Traditions from Morocco to Afghanistan (2026–27), Art Institute of Chicago; African Brilliance: A Diplomat’s Sixty Years of Collecting, Palmer Museum of Art (2020). Recent publications include “The Great Mosque of Kilwa: An Architectural Lodestone,” The Routledge Companion to Global Renaissance Art (2024), and “Carved Doors as Afro-Arab-Asian Congruence,” Monsoon: Journal of the Indian Ocean Rim (2025).
Kristina Richardson
Kristina Richardson is Professor of History and Middle Eastern & South Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Virginia. She specializes in histories of non-elite groups in the Middle East. She is the author of two monographs: Difference and Disability in the Medieval Islamic World (2012) and Roma in the Medieval Islamic World: Literacy, Culture, and Migration (2022). She also co-edited the Notebook of Kamāl al-Dīn the Weaver in 2021. She is currently writing a book—Black Basra—on free and unfree South Asian and East African agricultural laborers in early Islamic Iraq.
Stephanie Wynne-Jones
Professor Stephanie Wynne-Jones is an archaeologist of Africa who explores the links between people, landscapes, history and material culture. Her work is grounded in an understanding of daily life and human experience. In exploring this, she has worked on understanding urbanism from the ground up and has an ongoing fascination with the ways that people use and interact with objects. She has recently begun an ERC-Advanced Grant project based in the Zambezi Valley of Zambia and Zimbabwe. Previously, she directed a series of excavation and survey projects in eastern Africa, including a study of resource use in early towns on Zanzibar and large-scale excavations at the World Heritage Site of Songo Mnara.
Angela Zhang
Angela Zhang recently finished a postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard University. She earned her doctorate at York University in Toronto. Her work focuses on the socio-cultural history of slavery in late Medieval and Early Modern Mediterranean through archival work Florence, Marseille and Valencia.. Her work is supported by the Canadian and Ontario governments, Harvard University, RaceB4Race, Renaissance Society of America, and the Medieval Academy of America.