Phi Beta Kappa Visiting Scholar | Kristina Richardson: "A History of Slavery and Racial Capitalism in the Islamic Indian Ocean"

Professor Kristina Richardson, a Phi Beta Kappa visiting scholar, will discuss the development of racial capitalism occurring prior to trans-Atlantic slave trade, as early as the 7th-century in the Middle East. The Indian Ocean slave trade funneled millions of people from eastern Africa, western India, and the southern Indian Ocean into the Middle East, where they worked mostly as common laborers. Known collectively as "blacks," the shift from ethnic to racial classifications of these African and Asian slaves was evident in language, maps, and in their erasure from cultural landscapes where genealogy was the basis of status.

Kristina Richardson is the John L. Nau III Professor of the History and Principles of Democracy and Professor of History and Middle Eastern & South Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Virginia. Professor Richardson 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). This last one was awarded the Dan David Prize, the largest history prize in the world, the Monica H. Green Prize for Distinguished Medieval Research from the Medieval Academy of America, and Honorable Mention for the Middle East Medievalists Book Prize. She also co-edited the Notebook of Kamāl al-Dīn the Weaver in 2021. She is currently writing a book on free and unfree South Asian and East African agricultural laborers in early Islamic Iraq. Her work has been supported by the National Endowment of the Humanities, the Marie Curie Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, and the City University of New York.

This event is free and open to the public. No registration is required. At 5:30 p.m., a public reception will follow in the Bowdoin College Museum of Art entryway Pavilion.

Sponsored by the Phi Beta Kappa Society Visiting Scholar Program and the Phi Beta Kappa Alpha of Maine Chapter; Bowdoin College Museum of Art; the Departments of Africana Studies, Anthropology, Art History, Classics, History, and Romance Languages and Literatures; and the Middle Eastern and North African Studies Program.