ENGL 5790-01: Race and Racism in the 18th Century

Section Description: This course, on race and racism in the long eighteenth century, traces a philosophical lineage from Francois Bernier’s “The Division of the Earth” (1684) to William Lawrence’s “On the Natural History of Man” (1819) in order to examine how Enlightenment- and Romantic-era Europeans understood and theorizes human difference. We consider debates surrounding monogenism and polygenism, the legality and morality of slavery, and the relationships between colonizing and indigenous peoples as they are taken up by a range of historians, political economists, natural scientists, and, importantly, poets, playwrights, and novelists. How did philosophical questions about difference inform eighteenth-century aesthetics, and how did literary form open up new avenues of inquiry into the meaning of race?